Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  When a mustachioed Gabi emerged, Attila handed him a wig and a fedora and told him to put them on. Gabi returned from the bathroom looking like a grade-school thespian. Attila fell off the bed laughing, but it was the cackle of the stupendously doomed. He and this clown he’d handpicked were supposed to knock off a post office in a few hours. Attila took a mascara brush and darkened Gabi’s patchy mustache, then it was time to put on their dress shirts and suits over their shorts and T-shirts. “Always keep one eye on me and it will be fine,” Attila told Gabi before swallowing his third glass of whiskey. Soon Gabi’s stomach was bothering him as well, and he and Attila were fighting for turns in the bathroom.

  Around 2:30 Attila got his Camel gym bag out of the closet—which folded and zipped into a coaster-size pad—and stuffed it into his back pocket. They synchronized their watches and prepared to leave separately. Gabi was to take a taxi—one without a CB radio—to a location several blocks from the post office and give the driver 5,000 forints ($32) to wait while he ran an errand. (“A what?” “An errand.”) Attila was going to take a separate cab to another corner. They would meet on the opposite side of the intersection from the post office.

  Attila was about to send Gabi off when he realized he’d forgotten something. “Wait a second,” he said, running back into the kitchen. He was so drunk that he’d almost forgotten his plan. “Watch this,” he said, emerging with two empty bottles of wine. He picked up the oversize shoebox in which his Transylvanian meats had come and placed the bottles inside. Then he grabbed a blue Parker pen and a paper napkin, on which he wrote, Greetings Colonel Lajos Varjú, vice commander, sir! He thought for another moment but couldn’t come up with anything else, so he just signed the note, XY!! and stuck it in with the bottles. Attila wrapped the package in brown construction paper and taped it up. Then he picked up the pen again and inscribed another higher-profile name on the top of the box—Sándor Pintér, national police chief—along with a fictional address. He’d show them lucky. Attila handed Gabi the package. It was time to go.

  By 3:30 p.m. one-third of UTE’s starting lineup was positioned on the pavement at opposite ends of the Fehérvári Street shops. It was a splendid afternoon for robbery: cloudless and August-delirium warm. Gabi was miserable. He was sweating profusely beneath his double-layered clothes, and his scalp was itching under the wig. In his arms he cradled the package for the police chiefs.

  Before assuming his post at the corner, Attila had strolled by the glass front door of the post office, taking a quick count of how many customers were inside. Now, when anyone came in or out, he threw his left hand down to his side and, like a baseball catcher, signaled to Gabi with his fingers the number of people left in the building. This went on for twenty minutes. Every time the count got down to one—the number Attila had said they needed in order to start—someone else went in. Thanks to the half hour Attila had wasted having two more whiskeys at the pub across the street, Gabi was becoming convinced that the post office would close before they ever got inside. Then the sign came: one index finger pointing down, followed by a quick thumbs-up. They began walking toward the door from opposite sides.

  Gabi entered first, as planned, and got in line to send Attila’s package behind the only customer in the place. The interior looked just the way Attila had drawn it in the diagram. It was a rectangular office with a small foyer and four glass-encased teller booths. No security guard, no camera, and all female employees. When the customer in front of Gabi left, the woman working booth number one told him, “Just a moment, please.” She stood and walked out into the front, past Attila, who was filling out a lottery ticket at a counter; pulled a key out of her pocket; and locked the front door. “We’re about to close,” she told Gabi upon returning to the booth. Gabi handed her the package, and just as the teller turned her head to pull the mailing forms from her desk, Attila’s voice pierced the stillness. “Robbery!” he shouted. “Hands up and two steps back!” (No more “Down on the floor!”s for Attila. He’d learned after the calamity at Ó Street that if he got the employees down there, they were liable to hit an alarm.)

  Attila’s command was so jarring that even Gabi almost put up his hands, but he regained his composure and instead reached for the gun in his raincoat pocket. He pointed it at the teller in front of him, who already had her hands in the air, and said unconvincingly, “If you do what he says, everything’s going to be fine.” One of the other employees was already on the phone with the police when Attila bounded onto the chest-high counter and vaulted his body and legs over the tall glass divider.

  Impressed, Gabi backed up toward the door to assume his post. Within a minute he began to hear what would become a familiar sound: the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of the packs of bills hitting the bottom of the plastic grocery bags Attila used to collect the money before transferring it during the getaway to his Camel duffel, which he never allowed to be seen during the robberies’ commission. Gabi also could hear the post office phone ringing off the hook, but he was only supposed to keep track of the time. Two and a half minutes. Two-forty-five…

  Just as Gabi was about to yell three minutes, Attila came back through the side door and walked quickly toward him. With the key that was already in the lock, Attila let them out into the sun, then turned and, with the same key, closed up the office for the day.

  Lajos Varjú pulled up to the post office in his newly issued white Volkswagen Golf, sirens and blue lights blazing, to find the building secured. No one, including the police, could get in—or out. This hitch was a little tough for Lajos to take, since the post office was one of three Lajos had preselected as a probable Lone Wolf target due to its distance from the local police precinct and its location in Buda, where most of the robberies had occurred. As instructed, one of the employees had called the police hotline as soon as two suspicious men sauntered in wearing raincoats on a sunny August afternoon. But the operator at police headquarters was so incredulous that one of the places the robbery department had prepped was actually in play that she asked the employee to call back if she was serious. When no callback came, the operator phoned the post office but got no answer.

  It was Thursday, and as Lajos stepped up to the curb in front of the locked post office, József Jónás, the on-scene reporter for Kriminális, was already taping his stand-up piece for that evening’s show. “Here come the police now” were the words Lajos caught from the Kriminális reporter’s mouth as he approached the crime scene, followed by “Colonel Lajos, what do you have to say?”

  Lajos staggered through an interview in which it became apparent that the media had surmised the same thing he had from the scant information already available. The nonviolent post office robbery was the latest effort by the Lone Wolf, who once again had taken on what one newspaper would call “a servant.” When Lajos finally got inside, he was handed the evidence the dispatcher had warned him about, a wrapped shoebox addressed to Sándor Pintér, the highest-ranking police officer in the country. Lajos had little choice but to call in the bomb squad to open it. His next call was to his wife, informing her not to wait for him for dinner. He couldn’t bear to sit with her through another episode of Kriminális.

  Fortunately, all the reporters were gone by the time the captain of the bomb squad handed Lajos the empty Boglari merlot and Kiskóŕösi Kékfránkos (both 1994 vintages) and the napkin offering him greetings.

  Lajos then stomped over to the two sörozóś, or pubs, across the street, where he’d also prepped the staffs with sketches and asked them to be on the lookout for a man in a wig ordering whiskey. At the Jáger Pub, the owner slapped himself on the forehead with his open hand. “I knew I was supposed to remember something,” the bar owner said, pulling a folded-up Lone Wolf police sketch from his breast pocket. “This guy was here earlier with another guy,” he said, nodding at the small green benches surrounding a row of wooden tables with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. “You were right, Detective. He drinks whiskey. Had two Johnnies and left a great tip.”r />
  That night, back at police headquarters, the empty halls of the police building echoed with Lajos’s screams while his wife and 4 million others tuned in to a memorable Kriminális. The show’s on-scene report featured a tongue-tied Lajos stepping onto the sidewalk in front of the post office in a white Puma T-shirt and ruefully admitting that the job indeed appeared to have been done by the city’s increasingly famous robber who was “asking for the money—because that’s how he does it: he asks.” Noting the thief’s penchant for downing whiskey before the heists, Kriminális host László Juszt christened the thief the Viszkis Rabló, or the Whiskey Robber. The nickname not only stuck but, to the apparent delight of everyone, as Blikk wrote the next day, the Whiskey Robber was “making the life of the police an absolute misery.”

  The following week that misery grew with the publication of a story in the daily newspaper Népszava that Lajos had done his best to suppress. The article, headlined the gentleman robber sent a message to the detectives, described the Whiskey Robber as a korszer betyár, or a modern bandit. It was a clear reference to the nineteenth-century Hungarian folk legend Sándor Rózsa, known as the Hungarian Robin Hood, who stole from the elite as they crossed the Hungarian plain on horseback and who fought as a freedom fighter against the Hapsburgs in the 1848 revolution. “It isn’t impossible that he [the Whiskey Robber] is giving his money to the poor,” Népszava wrote.

  With sixty thousand homeless on the streets of Budapest, and two-thirds of the country living around or below the poverty line, who didn’t want to believe it?

  Seventeen

  September 1996

  Except for the fact that the old shoes in his closet now held 2.5 million forints ($16,500) instead of his allowance, nothing about Gabi’s life changed for three weeks after the robbery. Amid the Star Wars movie posters and Bobby Orr hockey manuals that decorated the childhood bedroom in which he still slept, the Whiskey Robber’s accomplice impatiently waited out his boss’s mandatory spending freeze. The only benefit Gabi could see in Attila’s agonizing austerity program was that it bought him some time to devise an explanation for how [blank] had suddenly made him rich. What had transpired, he decided, was that he’d started a company selling tourist trinkets and spoof gift items such as signs reading, the more people i meet, the more i like my dog. Sales were surprisingly brisk, he told his parents, who were fighting with each other too much to notice that their son had no merchandise to speak of, much less an office or a clue as to how to run a business. Twenty-two days after the robbery, Gabi fished 2 million forints ($13,000) out of a penny loafer and bought himself a charcoal gray Mercedes 190E.

  Not coincidentally, that was about the same time that Attila told Gabi they were going to celebrate their new partnership with a trip. After practice one day, so as not to raise the suspicion of their teammates, Attila and Gabi split up and sped separately through the streets in their luxury vehicles to a travel agency Attila had picked out. Attila was twenty-eight years old now and had been to Austria, Egypt, France, Spain, Italy, Thailand, and Tunisia—enough to know what he wanted in a vacation. When they got to the counter, Attila asked for a “luxury, all-inclusive, money-is-no-object two-week trip for two to the Dominican Republic.”

  “And make it sing,” he added.

  The total cost was 750,000 forints ($5,000). They were handed the paperwork, and Gabi watched to see what Attila would do. Attila picked up a pen and wrote down his name and address on the forms; Gabi followed. Then they piled up what remained of their stolen money on the counter and left with their plane tickets and itinerary in hand. Outside, Attila launched into one of his many lectures, this one inspired by the pseudonym Gabi had used on the travel documents they’d just filled out. “Everyone slips on a banana peel,” he said to Gabi. “Your car, your television, your vacations, anything you buy has to be legitimate. Are you listening, Gabi? You have to pay attention to everything. Your parents aren’t going to find the money, are they? Remember, there’s no perfect crime. Keep that in mind. That’s why the details are the most important thing. It’s easy to take the cash, but before and after you have to pay attention.”

  The visit to the travel agency had also illustrated for Gabi another of Attila’s familiar tutorials: less than a month ago Gabi was rich, and now he was once again forintless. “It’s incredible,” Gabi said. Attila, who had already broken his own three-week rule and lost the bulk of his remaining cash gambling, laughed. “You see, Gringo,” he said, employing his new nickname for his accomplice, “it’s a vicious cycle. Journeys, casinos, girls, high life.”

  They weren’t the only ones living above their official tax bracket. The previous morning—September 20, 1996—the biggest scandal since the fall of communism exploded across the pages of the nation’s newspapers. Márta Tocsik, a well-connected Hungarian politico, had been hired as a lawyer by the Horn government to do a privatization deal involving the transfer of public lands. For her few weeks of work, the Hungarian media reported, Tocsik, who had never even passed the bar exam, was paid 800 million forints ($5.2 million), much of which was allegedly promised to be funneled back into the pockets of government officials. The Tocsik story, soon dubbed by the Hungarian media “the Scandal of the Century” in a nod to the O. J. Simpson case, appeared to offer irrefutable proof of the hypocrisy and injustice of Eastern Europe’s so-called democracy. Like millions of his fellow citizens, the Whiskey Robber was outraged.

  “Can you believe this Tocsik,” he said, herding Gabi into his bordeaux Opel Omega (his Alfa Romeo had been swiped from the parking lot behind Éva’s apartment building). “The state is only abusing the people. They just squeeze them up like a slice of orange until they get all the juice out of them. You know, we’re robbing the state, but the state is robbing us. The difference is that we’re not causing damage to anybody.”

  “What we’re doing is a drop in the bucket compared with the privatization,” Gabi said.

  They drove south across the metal-framed Szabadság Bridge into Pest and down past the 4 Tigers market, by that point known as a major drug stop on the heroin road from Istanbul to the West.

  “You know, in the sixties and seventies, the Sicilian and Marseilles gangs robbed all across Europe,” Attila said. “The Red Brigades, the IRA, Che Guevara. They all supported their political causes with bank robberies.”

  “After all, it’s the state who’s supposed to be supporting us, right?” Gabi said.

  They continued into the industrial southern part of the city and pulled up across the street from a row of two-story buildings. Under a second-floor church was a green and white sign marking a branch of the OTP Bank, the only financial institution in which the Hungarian government still had an ownership stake.

  “This money belongs to the people,” Attila said, eyeing the concrete-encrusted OTP, which during communism had been the only bank chain in Hungary. “Plus, the more we get, the more we’re going to put back into the system over time anyway.”

  “It’s like we’re not even robbing. We’re just borrowing the money for a while,” Gabi added.

  “That’s why we never take money from customers or employees,” Attila said.

  “It’s out of the question,” Gabi said.

  When they entered the OTP’s large, square, couch-adorned waiting area at 3:30 p.m. two days later, the bank’s guard was on the phone in the corner of the room, possibly speaking to a comedian. He shut up mid-cackle when he found his cheek flat against the cold brown linoleum, his Parabellum pistol stripped from its holster, and his back repurposed as a floor cushion for the Whiskey Robber’s knee. In the meantime, the bandit’s accomplice had unloaded a can of black spray paint into the lens of the video camera above the door.

  No one behind the counter even noticed the disturbance until Attila stood up and yelled at the tellers, “Robbery! Hands up and two steps back.” There were five employees, all women, and a couple of unintimidating customers. While Attila went behind the counter to work on opening the cash drawe
rs, Gabi yelled something like “No one should hit an alarm because we have other accomplices waiting outside.” He was nervous; it was his first bank job.

  Attila drained each teller’s cash drawer and easily found the small safe that was poorly hidden inside the only wooden wardrobe-like piece of furniture behind the counters. The door to the metal money box itself wasn’t even shut, much less locked. After he collected the loot in plastic bags, Attila called the manager over and got the key to the front door so he could lock the crew inside. When they got back out, Gabi broke the rules and sprinted, like Karcsi had three years earlier, back to the car, in this case a taxi, which they had asked to wait for them while they ran “an errand.” After thanking the driver for his patience and berating his partner for his paranoia, Attila transferred the money into the Camel duffel bag. They got out at a nearby subway station and, walking through the bustling concourse, stripped off their outer layers of clothes and threw them into garbage cans, then boarded the train. At Moscow Square, they transferred to the no. 61 tram, careful to board separate train cars, and rode to Villányi Street. Once home, Attila removed the cardboard money clips for Gabi to burn in the bathroom and began counting. And counting. It was 7.5 million forints ($49,000)—his second-highest score ever, after the Kemenes Street post office. Attila reorganized the money into two piles—Gabi’s share was half minus 10 percent for prep costs—and took back Gabi’s gun for safekeeping.

  In a red velvet upholstered basement, Keszthelyi and Mound laid out the Whiskey Robber newspaper articles and case files flat on the floor as if dealing a hand of solitaire. Even their publicity-happy host had agreed that whatever transpired that afternoon in the incense-filled chamber would not be disclosed later. The three of them sat in silence for several minutes. Then Józsi Barát spoke. “I see a very large house with a lake,” the famous Hungarian psychic intoned, holding out his long hands, one of which carried a gold chain with a round pendant. “Your robber is a rich man from a large and very wealthy family.”