In mid-October, Attila and Gabi returned from shark hunting in the Dominican Republic just in time to go swimming with the minnows of the Hungarian hockey league. Several players from the previous season’s winless squad had found it a mental imperative to retire from athletics permanently, and Coach Pék had predictably encountered some difficulty retooling his insolvent traveling circus with functioning adults. The three new players he’d managed to sign up were a seventeen-year-old goalie from the junior league with whom Attila would share playing time and two former UTE standouts now in their forties.
A few seconds into the first full practice scrimmage, it became evident to the players that their plight was even worse than it had appeared on paper: the two old-timers no longer possessed the ability to skate backward. A walkout was averted only by Coach Pék’s assurances that none of the other players he’d tried to acquire were UTE material anyway. Some had actually complained to Pék during their tryouts that the ceiling in the UTE shower room was collapsing, which, while true, was utterly irrelevant to anyone interested in playing in an open-air stadium, where rain, snow, and batteries regularly fell from the sky.
For his own sanity, Attila pledged he would do anything in his power to make this a better season than the last. He hired a contractor and personally shouldered the cost of having the ceiling in the shower room refinished. He also bought a new refrigerator for the club, which he put in the locker room so that cold beer would be readily and abundantly available.
Gabi had his own method of coping. A few days before the season opener, he quit. Having suddenly become the second-richest player in the league, he realized he had, at twenty-two, accomplished everything he’d ever hoped to do in the sport. He turned his attention instead to his new pastime of snorting cocaine and playing foosball with Gangsta Zoli in the rapper’s mom’s living room.
Gabi also moved out of his parents’ place and into a renovated two-room apartment in Budakeszi, the swanky northwest Budapest suburb, where he enjoyed a panoramic view of the leafy Buda hills, beyond which lay the city.
Budakeszi and its closer-to-town equivalent known as Rose Hill were the Hollywood Hills of Budapest. The underdeveloped, forested clumps that rose from just beyond the western bank of the Danube were home to many of Budapest’s highest-profile people, including the prime minister, Gyula Horn. Gabi had found a several-acre plot listed in the paper and bought it for just 1.5 million forints ($9,800) in cash. Within a few weeks he had hired an architect and was custom-designing a dream house worthy of a Hungarian Wayne Gretzky, complete with Jacuzzi, wraparound balcony, and manicured gardens. To save on construction costs, Gabi picked out a team of workmen from the daily 4:00 a.m. illegal-immigrant assembly in Moscow Square. But his 3.38-million forint ($22,000) share of the last robbery was disappearing quickly.
While exploring his new neighborhood’s small commercial strip one afternoon, Gabi couldn’t help but notice the quaint local OTP Bank branch. He specced out all the measurements his partner required: distance to the police station (two minutes), number of tellers (five), number of women tellers (five), guards (one), video camera (yes, located above the entrance). One day in November he called Attila with his new cell phone and told him the details.
Attila was skeptical, but after their triumphant evenings skirt-chasing in the Dominican Republic, he’d developed a sincere fondness for his partner and wanted him to feel like an indispensable part of their team. Plus, Attila liked the idea of mining a new part of town. A few days later Gabi was walking around his property when Attila called. “Nice work, Gringo,” Attila told him. “I made a floor plan. It’s going to work.”
In deference to the Tocsik story, Attila began to refer to their robberies as balhék, or “little scandals.” Mindful of the Kriminális broadcast schedule, they set the date for their third joint balhé for Thursday, November 21, conveniently in the middle of the only gameless ten-day stretch of the hockey season. When the 8:00 a.m. practice ended, Attila sped home to his Villányi Street apartment, where only Gabi was waiting for him. (Attila’s uncle had finally gone back to Transylvania for good; Éva had caught him washing cars on his own for a cut rate at night and fired him.) It was just after 10:00 a.m., but time was tight: Attila needed to be back in uniform at UTE by five for the afternoon practice, or else he’d lose his alibi and risk finding out that the garbage can that would have to stand in for him was a no less effective goal stopper.
For a couple of hours, Attila and Gabi role-played the balhé with Gabi as the guard and Attila’s armoire as the safe. But Attila kept breaking and entering the bathroom instead. His stomach was killing him. He did his best to drown his nerves with whiskey, prompting Gabi to make a request. “Promise me you’re not going to stop in at a bar again,” Gabi said, referring to their first robbery together in August, when Attila jumped in to the Jáger Pub for his customary pre-robbery double. “Okay,” Attila said. “I’ll fill up here.” By the time they left the apartment, he was smashed.
They arrived on separate street corners in clashing wigs and matching trench coats by tram, subway, and a pair of taxis and began their march to the bank entrance at 1:00 p.m. But as they were closing in on their target, Gabi watched Attila peel off course and scramble into the grocery store next door to the bank. “Cramps,” Attila said, holding his stomach, when he wobbled out of the market fifteen minutes later. They were about to reach the bank door on the second try when Attila veered off into the grocery yet again. This time he came out carrying a loaf of bread in a plastic bag. He had realized at the last moment that he’d forgotten to bring a sack in which to collect the loot.
Despite all the holdups, the holdup went so well that the flimsy plastic bread bag almost broke from the weight of the haul. It was a new record, 14 million forints ($90,000). By 5:00 p.m. Attila was back in uniform at the UTE stadium, though so stinking drunk that some of his teammates took offense that their unofficial disciplinarian thought he could go on a pre-practice bender now that their record was an abysmal 0–7. When an easy goal trickled between Attila’s legs, one of his teammates clobbered him on the head with his stick so hard that a nail from Attila’s helmet lodged inside his skull, requiring yet another visit to Dr. Tóth. Attila hardly noticed.
In its millicentennial year, Hungary was looking more and more like a rebellious teen desperate for attention than an eleven-hundred-year-old old man who coulda, shoulda, woulda.
Hungary’s black market accounted for 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, compared with 5 percent or less in Western Europe. Arrests for fraud and embezzlement plagued the banking system. The head of Hungary’s Olympic swimming federation copped to having invented a swim meet and race times to qualify eleven of the country’s twenty-two swimmers for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. (“This is not the Scandal of the Century,” he said, defending his refusal to resign his federation post.) Even László Juszt, the Kriminális host, made the news when police traced a stolen Mitsubishi to his garage. (He claimed ignorance and surrendered the vehicle.)
It was difficult to know whether to thank or cordon off the FBI’s International Law Enforcement Academy. In 1996, 230 Hungarian cops were convicted on charges ranging from bribery to falsifying official documents to using excessive force during interrogations. And their boss, National Police Chief Sándor Pintér—the FBI’s primary liaison in Hungary—was in deeper than any of them. Concerns about the crooked associations of the FBI’s man in Budapest never made CNN, but they had been building in Hungarian police circles over the summer. They began with his hiring a co-owner of Cats Club (Zubovics’s partner) to head up the construction project for a new Budapest police headquarters building, from whose budget hundreds of millions of forints soon allegedly disappeared. Then in November, questions about Pintér’s connection to Budapest’s underworld intensified, this time because his fingerprints were reportedly found at the scene of a mob-related shooting of a famous horse jockey. When it turned out that evidence implicating the suspects had v
anished from the search site, Pintér first denied he’d been at the scene, then clarified his denial to mean that he had been there but only to aid the investigation because it was on his way home from a dinner.
As with the Tocsik case, no one outside Hungary blinked. In Washington, FBI director Louis Freeh donned a tuxedo and was chauffeured to the Kennedy Center in Washington for a gala celebrating Hungary’s eleven hundredth anniversary and its smooth transition to a model democracy. Given the festive decor and congratulatory speeches, it appeared that attendees had not been briefed on the fact that the country they were toasting was in tatters. (The party’s host, socialite Betty Knight Scripps, announced she’d only recently become cognizant that goulash was a Hungarian soup but did claim to know plenty of Hungarians, such as actor Tony Curtis, who attended the party, and that “you can’t help but fall in love with them!”)
Two weeks later Hungary’s interior minister summarily fired Pintér as well as Pintér’s second in command, László “The 12 Percent” Valenta, and several other top Hungarian national and city police brass. With or without the FBI’s blessing, Hungary’s police department was going to start over from scratch.
In the midst of the turmoil, one lower-level police chief found his image buoyed by contrast: Lajos Varjú, leader of the comparably squeaky-clean robbery division, who watched a remarkable none of his detectives get arrested that year. In the fall, with few choices, a Hungarian law enforcement organization extended Lajos an invitation to speak at its international conference on auto theft. Despite having a month earlier felt so hopeless about the Whiskey Robber case that he approved Detective Keszthelyi’s request to visit a psychic, Lajos was re-energized. He not only accepted the invitation to speak at the conference but decided that the subject of his car theft address would be the infamous Whiskey Robber, whom he was going to catch.
To prepare for his presentation, Lajos asked Dance Instructor to come up with a comprehensive, FBI-quality analysis of what was now more than a thousand pages of case files, which had been purged of the report on the session with Józsi Barát, the psychic. On November 21 Dance Instructor sauntered into Lajos’s office, wearing a black tuxedo and a top hat, and presented his boss with his latest effort and a map of the city.
“What’s this?” Lajos asked Dance Instructor, pointing to the map.
“I also charted the locations of the robberies,” he said. “You can draw two concentric circles around the crimes, with the exception of the Sixteenth District. One circle fits within the other. If you connect the dots, a straight line goes through both circles.”
Lajos took a closer look at the drawing but was still befuddled by the hieroglyphics.
“What are you trying to tell me?” Lajos asked.
“If you take into account the last crimes, there is also a third circle,” Dance Instructor said.
“And?”
“Perhaps the perpetrator wants to spread his activities?”
Lajos thanked the Instructor and began reading the report, which included such witness descriptions of the Whiskey Robber as “he generates trust and gives a very manly impression” and “he is a ridiculous foreign homosexual.” Dance Instructor also did what he could to piece together the most telling details of the robber’s physical appearance, noting that “his nails are clean. His fingers are long and thin… but very little data on the ears.”
Lajos was still engrossed in the report two hours later when his phone rang. Two men in wigs and trench coats had just cleared 14 million forints ($90,000) out of the OTP Bank in the hills of Budakeszi. Lajos nearly threw his phone out the window. He rifled through the pages on his desk and pulled out Dance Instructor’s map. What was that about the third concentric circle? The call center also mentioned one other thing: though there was no note left at the scene this time, a large round loaf of fresh white bread was found inside the safe.
Eighteen
Just after 8:00 p.m. on a snowy Tuesday evening six weeks later, Gabi’s phone interrupted his weekly television ritual.
“Hello,” he said, picking up the receiver and hitting the mute button on his TV remote.
“Are you watching this?” Attila asked.
As they were both well aware, Kriminális had switched from Thursday nights to Tuesdays at the end of 1996. It wasn’t something they could easily forget. On the show’s final Thursday broadcast, Juszt had announced that if the Whiskey Robber was out there listening, he should “please move your robberies to Monday or Tuesday if you want us to be able to cover them on that week’s program.”
Attila and Gabi had intended to oblige. It had been an expensive holiday season for them both. With the earnings from their last gig, Gabi had paid for his and a friend’s two-week Christmas safari in Kenya. Attila had gone home and met a stunning woman in Transylvania who had had an effect on him not unlike a casino: once again, his pockets were empty.
The partners had agreed that with little planning they could pilfer the same Budakeszi OTP Bank in Gabi’s neighborhood from which they’d gotten 14 million forints ($90,000) in November, and considerate of the Kriminális host’s request, they would do so on Tuesday, January 14. But it was so cold that Tuesday that neither of them wanted to take public transportation to the gig; instead, they carpooled to the robbery in Gabi’s Mercedes, where it was accordingly comfortable and warm and where they had completely lost their focus. Four o’clock came and went while Attila was giving Gabi a report on the two books he’d just finished, one on Hungarian folk hero Sándor Rózsa, the other on the Mexican revolutionary hero of the early twentieth century Emilio Zapata. Meanwhile, the bank had closed. They had no choice but to rob it the following day and wait almost a whole week to see what Kriminális would say.
As usual, Juszt’s program presented a bit of information about the 8-million-forint ($43,000) robbery that Attila and Gabi had not seen in any of the newspaper coverage. And it wasn’t good. According to Kriminális, as soon as the robbers had entered the bank, one of the employees had recognized them and phoned the police. She never had time to say anything on the phone, though, because the perpetrators had started the robbery too quickly. But she hadn’t hung up. She’d placed the receiver on her desk, where it acted as a microphone for the police call center to record the entire robbery. Hoping to curry some favor with the influential Kriminális host, Lajos Varjú had offered Juszt the exclusive, knowing Juszt’s show was his only chance to provoke a response from the public. “Bank robbery,” Attila had just listened to himself yell on national television. “Everyone on the floor!” (For bigger institutions, he’d gone back to the “floor” method for safety reasons.)
Juszt asked viewers to call the police if they recognized the voice.
“Gabi,” Attila wanted to know from his partner. “Can you tell it’s me on the tape?”
It wasn’t so much the cops Attila was worried about as it was the woman preparing to move in with him.
While he was home in Csíkszereda over the holidays, Attila had gone out to the Flash Dance Nite Klub on Christmas Eve, hardly expecting to gamble. But on the dance floor was a gorgeous, shapely long-brown-haired girl that no one could take their eyes off. Attila accepted, and won, a bet from one of his friends that he could pick her up in ten minutes.
Betty Gergely, who was twenty-one and wore a silver stud in one nostril, was from the nearby Székely town of Gyergyószentmiklós (or Gheorgheni, in Romanian). She told Attila she had recently moved back home after being deported from Greece, where she had been working on one of the islands as a dancer. Attila took this to mean she was stripping, got mixed up with the wrong people, and ran. That was okay with him. It meant she was just the type of girlfriend he’d been looking for: someone accustomed to secrecy.
Attila vacated his aunt and uncle’s place and spirited Betty off to the Ózon Hotel in the Hargita Mountains outside town. Betty was amazing. She spoke English, was strip club smokin’, and knew the Székely pig-killing ceremony by heart. After three days Attila had forgotten
or waived his rules of female engagement and had invited Betty to come live with him in Budapest. They were going to have the life. He’d help arrange her papers; she wouldn’t have to worry about money. “I’ve got it and that’s all,” he said. Betty wasn’t going to wait for a better offer. “There’s just one thing I have to take care of first,” Attila told her. He went back ahead of Betty and phoned the day after the robbery during which his voice was unwittingly recorded, telling her, “Come anytime.”
There were a few weeks left in the hockey season when Betty arrived by train with a single duffel bag. Attila picked her up at the Keleti train station, where nine years earlier he had experienced his own first taste of Budapest. The delicate arched glass ceiling and the way the trains pulled straight into the middle of the atrium still gave the place a turn-of-the-century aura. The only thing that had changed, Attila knew all too well, was the exchange rates offered by the robed men in the corners.
Quite a lot had turned for Attila, however, in the few short weeks since he’d last seen Betty. In Transylvania he’d been able to imagine himself as a romantic and carefree professional sportsman. But back in Hungary he was inescapably the hockey goalie for a team that hadn’t won a game in two years and the fugitive criminal featured weekly in video and audio clips on the nation’s top-rated television program. In case that wasn’t horrific enough, he was now duty-bound to create a curriculum that would screen all of that from the street-smart Székely with whom he was going to be sharing a pullout couch.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber Page 19