Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Despite Attila’s and Coach Orbán’s efforts, however, UTE’s promising season quickly fell apart. The highlight of the year turned out to be the new brand of fighting that the steel-skulled Szatmári brothers had brought over from Canada. Previously in Hungary when players fought, they hacked at each other with their sticks as if participating in a medieval jousting competition. The Szatmáris, to the astonishment of Hungary’s regular brawlers such as Bubu, actually took off their gloves and attempted to beat on their opponents like gentlemen. It may have worked in North America, but in Hungary it was an easy way to get your ass whupped. UTE finished the 1994–95 season with a miserly 7–13–2 record, the club’s first losing season in its history. It was almost as if they didn’t know who they were anymore. On the bus home from the last game, one of guys pointed to the cursive words Office and Home that had been emblazoned across their jerseys all season and asked, “What does this say?” No one knew. Their minds had been focused on other things, such as trying to figure out how to come up with the rent. Attila’s mind had necessarily begun to drift as well. All that losing was getting to him. During one game he was so aggrieved by his teammates’ performance that he smacked the net over and skated off the ice in the middle of play. For hours after losses he was inconsolable. If he wanted to remember the feeling of winning, he was going to have to look elsewhere.

  Thirteen

  Budapest

  Spring 1995

  The FBI’s first foreign training academy opened in Budapest on April 25 in an unmarked suburban housing block donated by the grateful Hungarian government. The inauguration ceremony went swimmingly, save for the last-minute cancellations of FBI director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who sent promises that they would visit Hungary sometime after the dust cleared in Oklahoma City, where the largest domestic act of terrorism in U.S. history had just claimed that city’s federal building, along with 168 American lives.

  Eastern Europe’s disillusionment with its governments may have been pronounced, but it hadn’t yet blossomed into civilian plots to bomb its people and institutions. Nor had the region’s burgeoning crime wave reached American proportions. Statistically, violent crime and robbery were actually worse in the United States than in Hungary in every category but auto theft. The concern of the FBI, however, was the less obvious dangers of postcommunist capitalism. It wasn’t just animal-pelt smugglers and post office bandits who were exploiting the weaknesses in the fledgling system. There were also a host of others—among them, cops and former KGB agents—who now had access to former Soviet Red Army weapons caches, and a world of potential buyers. Unsuspecting men and women seated in first class on regional Eastern European flights found themselves being solicited over soft drinks about their interest in acquiring nuclear arms. In the first few years of the 1990s, the FBI tracked thirty-seven cases of illicit shipments of radioactive material from Eastern Europe; no one could be sure how many deals went undetected. The end of the Cold War had buried one American enemy but possibly created thousands of even more dangerous ones.

  Overnight, the budget of the U.S. law enforcement service in Hungary leapfrogged that of the country’s own national police. The FBI’s International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) flew police officials to Budapest from all over Eastern Europe to train them to be better crime-stoppers. The two-month course it offered was said to be modeled on the same one given to recruits at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, modeled being the operative word. ILEA sessions began with an explanation of what a credit card was. Another session included a film clip of Clint Eastwood playing Dirty Harry, in which Harry kicks a suspect in the same leg that has just taken a bullet. It was an example, the FBI trainers told their trainees, of what not to do when apprehending a suspect. There was a lot of ground to cover; attendees were asked not to leave the premises until the two-month program was over.

  Lajos Varjú was among the Hungarian officials offered a chance to attend the academy, but he no longer felt comfortable leaving his post for eight minutes, much less eight weeks. However, he did become friendly with three FBI agents who made regular visits to the Budapest police headquarters during which Lajos learned to sing “Yankee Doodle,” even if he had no idea what it meant. In the course of one of the FBI flybys, Lajos managed to win the attention of the FBI interpreter long enough to ask his American counterparts a question about crime fighting. After a six-month break following the debacle the previous summer at the Ó Street travel agency—the longest hiatus since the Lone Wolf’s streak began in January 1993—the Budapest serial robber had pulled what was at least his eleventh successful job on January 12, 1995. The latest target was the same bank the robber had pillaged ten months earlier, where he’d so frightened the only male teller that the man had taken a soup shower under the table. This time the Lone Wolf had waltzed in, announced himself as “the guy from last time,” and waltzed out three minutes later with 2.8 million forints ($22,400). (“Sir robber is smart, tricky, and daring,” wrote Blikk.)

  The crack FBI team had a recommendation for Lajos: profiling. First, Lajos was told, he should begin gathering forensic evidence at crime scenes. Then he should start up a database of the findings.

  Brilliant, Lajos told them. And slightly presumptuous, he didn’t bother mentioning. Where to start? His forensics unit was largely composed of former secretaries and interns, since few Hungarians no longer receiving a weekly allowance from their parents saw the rationale in working full-time for $150 a month. There were twelve hundred openings at the Hungarian police. Adjusted for inflation, police salaries were now worse than they had been at the end of communism. Resources were so scarce that the Budapest police chief had recently admitted publicly that because of an ammunition shortage, the city’s cops were no longer allowed to take target practice. There were no state secrets anymore.

  As for compiling a witness interview database, it hardly seemed worth the hassle. The only computer in Lajos’s filing cabinet of an office was a hand-me-down from the fourth-floor administrative offices, made from mismatched parts and connected to an outlet whose current was occasionally shut down because of the delinquency status of the building’s electric bill.

  If the FBI really wanted to help, Lajos thought, they’d start cutting checks.

  That spring, however, Lajos did fish out all of the Lone Wolf’s files and asked Dance Instructor to browse through them again. Instructor quickly discovered what he believed was a trend. Just when the Lone Wolf appeared on the verge of becoming the country’s most prolific criminal, he had apparently begun to lose his appetite for robbing, at least in Budapest. In 1993 Dance Instructor had the Lone Wolf down for seven jobs (or eight, counting the unsuccessful attempt at Nyugati train station); in 1994 just three; and so far through the first several months of 1995, only one. Dance Instructor also postulated that the reason the thief never wore gloves while committing his crimes was that he probably had no police record and knew that his prints—even if recorded—were not on file. It was almost as if the thief wanted the police to know who he was.

  Lajos agreed with Dance Instructor. He didn’t think the Lone Wolf was your standard Planet of the Zorg–type felon. In fact, given the sporadic timing of the crimes, Lajos was pretty sure he was a sailor. That’s right: he goes out to sea, he comes back, he robs. The robberies were the sailor’s way of getting his thrills while on leave back home, high-flying stints that included big spending and, odds were, gambling.

  Lajos sent Keszthelyi and Dance Instructor across town to the headquarters of Mahart, the Hungarian state shipping company, where they misspent the next two months digging through thousands of employee files and investigating the mariners who were on leave during the time of the robberies. Meanwhile, Lajos and Mound made the rounds to the city’s gambling halls, to which they brought about ten different police sketches of the Lone Wolf, each from a different robbery and each portraying a different face and hairstyle. The casino managers agreed to call if the unrecognizable individual ente
red their midst.

  By the time summer arrived, no one had called, none of the sailors had checked out, and there were no new robberies. Once again Lajos asked the FBI for assistance and was counseled to try approaching the case in reverse, predicting the financial target where the thief would show up next. Lajos liked the idea and began compiling a list of the city’s banks and post offices. He also recalled from the field his four main detectives on the case—Keszthelyi, Mound, Dance Instructor, and the Fat—and assigned them each a group of institutions to visit. Appointments were made, and the detectives fanned out across the city with the sketches and instructions. They taught the employees how to use stalling techniques should the Lone Wolf—or anyone else, for that matter—attempt to deflower their business. And most important, they beseeched the bank’s management to invest in security systems, particularly cameras and guards. They couldn’t be too careful.

  Sure enough, on the afternoon of July 24, 1995, a call came in from a bank whose staff Lajos had briefed only a month earlier. The Lone Wolf had just walked out the door with 2.5 million forints ($20,000). He was long gone by the time the police arrived at the scene, but not all was lost. The bank had in fact heeded Lajos’s advice and invested in a security camera. The entire robbery had been recorded. Lajos couldn’t believe it. For the first time, he was going to get a look at his nemesis.

  Lajos raced across town to the bank’s central security center to get the videotape and then back to HQ and up to the fifth floor, where Mound, Keszthelyi, and the Fat were waiting next to the heretofore unused VCR. He put in the tape and they gathered around a small television.

  The choppy, silent black-and-white pictures showed a bird’s-eye view of the waiting area, into which a man with a mustache and short dark hair entered, dressed in a shirt and tie and carrying a black briefcase. He stepped up to one of the teller windows and appeared to inquire about something. Then, after about thirty seconds, the tape seemed to jerk into fast-forward mode. Quicker than the stuttering video frames could capture, the man pulled a gun out of his suitcase, jumped up on top of the waist-high counter, and disappeared into the back of the bank. The picture fell motionless for a little more than two minutes. Finally, the Lone Wolf appeared on-screen again, coming through a side door into the customer area with a plastic bag in his hand. He picked his briefcase up off the floor, stuffed the bag inside, and nonchalantly left out the front door.

  Lajos rewound the tape and played it back again, this time freezing the picture on the only direct shot of the robber, as he entered. As the detectives leaned in, they noticed something oddly familiar about the man.

  “It could be anyone,” Lajos said, shaking his head in disappointment.

  “Lali,” Mound said to his boss. “It could be you.”

  With his thick shock of black hair; bushy, coarse mustache; and fuzzy dark eyebrows, the Lone Wolf bore an uncanny resemblance to none other than Budapest’s robbery chief, Lajos Varjú.

  The bank’s address, on Lajos Street, no longer seemed incidental.

  Blikk, July 25, 1995, front page:

  2.4 Million Robbed

  Big Bucks and Four Double Whiskeys

  The criminal with no mask robbed the bank in his usual gentlemanly way…. He’s getting on the nerves of the police….

  Before he entered the bank, he was seen drinking four double whiskeys at a pub fifteen meters away.

  “A couple of minutes before noon, this gentleman entered,” said one of the tellers, Krisztina Sipos. “He was asking about bank loans and looking through leaflets. Just when we recognized that he was the guy we had the police sketches of, he pulled out a gun and jumped over the counter.”

  Attila threw the paper down on the ground and stomped out a Székely jig on his latest press. He was furious and, understandably, horrified. Five full frames of his face stared up at him from the tabloid’s front page.

  How could this have happened? He’d been eyeing the Lajos Street bank for over a year; it was just down the street from his new hideaway, the cozy basement Globe Royale Casino. But the last time he’d been inside the bank, a 3 in his book, there hadn’t been any video camera. Of course, he should have updated his data, but he hadn’t planned on doing the job until the fall. Then last weekend he met Betty. She wasn’t Éva, but she was the singer for the Hungarian rock band the Beasts, and she wanted the Chicky Panther to take her and her two friends to Costa Brava in Spain that weekend. (Éva wasn’t really his girlfriend, and anyway, she wouldn’t have to know. He could say he had a training camp.) But he hadn’t worked a paying job since his last robbery six months earlier, after which he’d taken luxury holidays with Éva to Italy and Thailand. He was running short on cash, especially to be hosting a vacation for a rock star and her posse.

  He’d checked around the bank’s premises the night before pulling the job and had even taken the time to prepare a surprise for the robbery chief with whom Attila was rather annoyed. He’d seen Lajos quoted in the papers describing Attila as “lucky,” when in fact Lajos had no idea what kind of preparation went into Attila’s business. As if to set him straight, Attila had cut and styled one of his dark wigs and darkened up his thick mustache to resemble the naive detective. But now who looked naive? Lajos wouldn’t be calling Attila lucky anymore, Attila thought; stupid, perhaps, or simply finished. Blikk’s national circulation was about 200,000. The Panther was out of the bag.

  Fourteen

  Tired of the wisecracks about being the serial robber, Lajos called a special meeting of his department and told them he was forming a subgroup to deal exclusively with the Lone Wolf case. They were going to catch a thief whose luck had finally run out, he told his team. “Who wants to take the lead on this?” he asked. “Anyone?” The ambitious young detective József Keszthelyi put up his hand. “Okay,” said Lajos. “You start today.”

  That afternoon the handsome twenty-six-year-old Keszthelyi took the Metro to the Lajos Street bank, where he was greeted as if he were a cockroach. “You’re only hindering my employees from working,” the bank’s manager, Belá Zarka, told Keszthelyi as he ran the young detective off the premises. “In any case, the insurance company is going to pay the damages.”

  Resilient as a roach, Keszthelyi headed back to HQ, made a copy of the bank’s surveillance tape, and then phoned up the portly television personality László Juszt, the host of Hungary’s top-rated program, Kriminális. Juszt’s show was a sort of Hungary’s Most Wanted, produced with the budget and technical sophistication of a typical American junior high school A/V department. But the show had been a huge hit, an example of how the creation of a free press had resulted in a great flowering of the tabloids. And as a result, the forty-two-year-old Juszt was one of the most important people at the police department and one of Hungary’s brightest homegrown stars.

  Paunchy and pale, Juszt had vaulted into the television news spotlight just after communism fell, doing short segments he called Sokkoló (Shocking), which investigated such contemporary horrors as traffic accidents. Two years later, in 1992, Juszt’s instinct for schlock led him to pitch a new idea—Kriminális—to his bosses at the nation’s only television station. They were skeptical. In communist times, there had been a similar show, called Blue Light, which had a loyal following and an even less telegenic host. But in those days, when the station carried little more than The Flintstones, Columbo, and cadaverous men reading irrelevant news, it didn’t matter how thick your Rolodex was. Reporting a story meant accepting the information with gratitude for the government official who had invented it. Without that luxury, where in the world did Juszt expect to find his news? No worries, Juszt told his station bosses. The son of a former communist minister, Juszt was quite sure his old connections and these egregious times could keep Kriminális flush with enough material for a 24-hour news channel.

  He was right. Even after the arrival of the ballyhooed new FBI training academy, the number of stories at Juszt’s disposal kept multiplying. By 1996 a new crime was committed in H
ungary every sixty-three seconds; three to four armed and increasingly violent robberies played out each week on the streets of the capital; each morning thirty-seven drivers awoke to find out that they no longer owned a car; and every Thursday night almost 4 million viewers, or 40 percent of Hungary, tuned in to Kriminális to watch their country’s dismantling.

  The program had started covering the Lone Wolf story after the embarrassing mishap last year at the travel agency at Ó Street, when Major Vigh’s men had responded to the wrong address. So Juszt was quite happy to take a call from Lone Wolf lead detective József Keszthelyi over at the robbery department. A bank camera videotape? Send it right over, Juszt said. Nothing like an exclusive. Just a few hours after Attila and the Hungarian rock band boarded an overnight bus for Spain, Kriminális broadcast the bank video footage from the Lajos Street robbery, flashing a special police hotline number on the screen for viewers to call if they recognized the perpetrator.

  Keszthelyi passed the next two weeks like a secretary. He fielded hundreds of calls, most of which were along the lines of the one from a man who was sure that the robber was the limousine driver for Viktor Orbán (no relation to the hockey Orbáns), then head of the conservative Alliance of Young Democrats and Hungary’s next prime minister. One caller swore he’d worked at a glass company with the thief for a brief time in 1988. But Keszthelyi didn’t think any of the tips or descriptions fit Dance Instructor’s profile, so he turned his attention back to the one unimpeachable piece of evidence he did have: the videotape. All Keszthelyi needed, he believed, was a close-up of the Lone Wolf’s face and the game would soon be over. But when the technical department enlarged a frame from the footage, the best image they could come up with revealed the serial robber to be nothing more than a thousand indistinguishable dots on a blank page: a big gray nobody.