Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  Tuesday evening—Kriminális night—was Attila and Betty’s special night out. Attila set the VCR to record, then whisked Betty around town to the bathhouses and the csárdás for no-frills traditional Hungarian soups and stews. Sometimes they double-dated with Gabi and his new girlfriend, Marian, a blond twentysomething advertising manager whom he’d met the previous summer at Lake Balaton but only had the balls to ask out since he’d become a millionaire. Attila gave Betty an allowance of 100,000–150,000 forints ($550–$820) a month for shopping, the gym, and classes to improve her conversational English—anything to keep her busy so he could just get through the last eight games of the catastrophic hockey season. He would then be able to re-evaluate his situation.

  UTE’s season had turned so unspeakably bad that Coach Pék had taken it upon himself to redefine the way his team measured success. The coach of the once-mighty hockey club told his players that if they held their opponents to fewer than ten goals in a game, they could consider it a victory. Betty, understandably, could not be allowed anywhere near the stadium. (“I’m superstitious,” Attila told her.) The only time she saw Attila play that year was in the season finale, against Alba Volán, which was carried live on national television. Mercifully, Attila played well and UTE salvaged a 3–3 tie. By Pék’s standard, that delivered UTE to a modest final 1996–97 season record of 11–13–2. The league office, however, put the tally at a somewhat less impressive 0–24–2.

  In late February, a few days after the hockey season ended, Attila took Betty on a ten-day vacation to the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. They got along great, and the trip was the first of many eventful journeys they would soon take, some of them romantic excursions to exotic locales, others mad, unannounced half-hour road trips to the apartment in Érd where Éva, Attila’s ex, lived.

  As much as Éva had sworn she’d never speak to Attila again after the pub debacle, she knew she couldn’t stay angry at him. She and Attila had resumed a close enough friendship that Attila felt comfortable barging into her apartment at midnight with his new girlfriend, demanding cooking lessons. One issue Attila had with Betty was that while she may have been familiar with heating water for a bathtub barrel, she didn’t know her way around a kitchen. This was, at first, a relief, given that Attila had a nonworking oven. But if Attila was going to live with someone, he did expect something in return. And he soon found himself having to explain that his stove—which had separate pilot lights from the oven below—was quite operational and that he preferred his bean soup with a couple of hooves, extra spicy, extra purple onion. Betty’s bean soup debut, however, was, in Attila’s judgment, a disaster. And before the burners had time to cool, Betty was on her way to meet Attila’s former lover. Upon their arrival, Attila introduced the girls, then implored Éva, “Teach her how to cook a bean soup.” Éva laughed, hoping it would put Betty at ease. It didn’t. Betty was standing in her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend’s apartment, being forced to learn to make a gas-inducing soup for a hockey goalie she realized she barely knew.

  A week later it got weirder. Betty found herself living with Éva. “I’m sorry,” Attila said, dropping Betty off at Éva’s place one morning in early March, “but it’s for your own protection. I have to take care of something and it could be dangerous. It’ll be only a couple of days.” Éva didn’t want to know what Attila was up to, but he was always generous. She couldn’t even keep track of how many times he’d loaned her money or bought her dinner. So she made up the couch for Betty.

  On his way back to his apartment alone, Attila stopped downtown, visiting the fashion boutiques on Váci (now called “Vice” Street) for some new Armani suits, then the wig store, where he purchased two new hairpieces. Back home, he pulled his guns and notebook out of the oven and laid the suits and wigs out on the couch; in no time, his little flat was once again a world-class robbery training facility and staging ground.

  The next day Attila and Gabi emerged separately onto the sidewalk on Kemenes Street near the Danube River in south Buda, Gabi nearly a block ahead of his partner. It was a cold Tuesday in March, and were it not for a dead lawyer, the two of them would have been in another part of town entirely, heading for an OTP Bank on Mester Street across the river in Little Chicago. But the preceding week, as Attila was beginning to memorize the Mester Street bank’s layout, it was robbed by an attorney and his driver, whom Attila guessed hadn’t accounted for the silent alarm. The driver got away, but the lawyer was shot by police before he could get out of the building. It seemed impertinent to try for that bank now, so Attila went back to his notebook. He figured it would be better to choose a target with which he was familiar, and picked the post office on Kemenes Street near the Gellért Hotel, where he’d delivered the roses and extracted 10 million forints ($62,000) a year earlier.

  Attila knew there was a risk in such a selection. If they did the Kemenes Street post office, it would be the third site he was revisiting. (He’d done the bank at Raday Street twice when he was still working alone, and he and Gabi had knocked off the Budakeszi OTP twice.) If the police were paying any attention, they could be monitoring the building. So, to be safe, Attila implemented a staggered entry: Attila would trail behind Gabi to survey the scene. If Attila started coughing, that was the sign to abort.

  As Attila approached the post office in his Italian suit and wig, a couple of minutes behind Gabi, he noticed a youngish couple holding hands outside the entrance. As he approached, both of them flashed him a glance. He kept walking past them and down the block all the way to the corner near the silver Erector set–style Szabadság Bridge, where he crossed the street. When he turned around again, the couple was almost a block up the street from the post office, heading in the opposite direction. Attila started back, with one eye on them. When he was almost to the post office’s entrance, he saw the couple cross the street and turn back down the hill again. One of them was on a cell phone.

  Attila looked through the post office’s glass door. Gabi was inside, going through the preliminary motions of distracting the most formidable looking teller with a series of questions and waiting for the word rablás! As the young couple closed in, Attila began coughing as loudly as he could, but Gabi was engrossed in an argument about the accuracy of the foreign mail delivery timetable. Attila was almost out of time. He flung open the post office door and hacked so hard that he nearly fell over, then, without looking behind him, turned and began walking briskly back down the hill.

  A minute later footsteps closed in.

  “What’s the problem?”

  It was Gabi.

  “I told you to fucking pay attention,” Attila said over his shoulder as they continued marching in single file down the street like toy soldiers on a conveyor belt.

  “I didn’t hear you,” Gabi said to Attila’s back.

  “I almost coughed out a lung,” Attila said, veering down a side street. Midway through the block, he stopped dead in his tracks and put his hands on his head. His wig was gone. He spun around just in time to see Gabi plucking it off a low-hanging parking sign near the corner.

  Later that night Attila unexpectedly retrieved Betty from Éva’s place. “What happened?” she asked. “It was fucking canceled,” he said. The following week Mr. Romance deposited her at Éva’s again. This time Attila drove straight to the Goldberg Pub in Óbuda, or Old Buda, where he met Gabi at a small table in the corner. A man at the next table strained to listen in as Attila described the new target: it was the OTP Bank branch at the end of the busy shopping strip known as Heltai Square, in the northern housing-block-riddled section of town. It was a heavily trafficked pedestrian area, yes, but there were several possible escape routes and the police response would be markedly slowed by the large congested parking lot in front of the shopping area.

  Gabi was tiring of all the planning, scheduling, and rescheduling. He proposed that they just go for one massive job—something like the downtown, full-city-block-size treasury building, where they could make enough cash to secure
their place in history and then relax for a while. “Imagine what Juszt would say,” Gabi said.

  “That’s why I don’t let you keep your gun, Gabi,” Attila replied, ready to get the check and go it alone. Gabi’s naïveté was almost as annoying to Attila as the robbery chief’s had been. Attila wondered, was he the only one who recognized this robbery thing wasn’t a game? True, the current political conditions couldn’t have been better for the costumed plunder of government symbols, but every other condition Attila could think of that was crucial to robbery success was much, much worse than it had been when he started.

  It was plain, at least to Attila, that he had gotten into the robbery racket during a geopolitical hiccup, a brief window of time when there was little need and even less money for sophisticated and expensive security systems. Now, thanks in no small part to his workmanship, even the smaller banks and post offices were installing cameras and hiring armed guards, another hidden downside of great publicity. The majority of financial institutions’ silent alarms now rang at both the police station and the office of a private security company, meaning the risk of an armed confrontation had increased dramatically. Then there was the matter of the money. An increasing number of the OTPs were reacting to the robbery boom by installing timelock safes. These primarily state-owned institutions were still Attila’s target of choice because their safes remained inferior to the stainless-steel security vaults employed by the wealthier foreign-owned banks, at least according to what Attila read and observed. And the fact that the OTPs still represented the ever-unpopular government was clearly stoking Attila’s image as a man of the people. But without his own network of informants and fellow criminals, Attila was struggling to keep abreast of even the most basic technical developments in his field. At the OTPs, for example, the money was no longer stashed in skeleton-key lockboxes. It was now held in steel-filing-cabinet-like units consisting of four drawers, each of which needed a unique key and code to open. From what he learned at the Budakeszi OTP, the lower the drawer, the more money it had inside but also the longer the time limit on the lock. Attila was still trying to figure out the range of time frames. At Budakeszi, the first two drawers opened within three minutes; he hadn’t been able to wait for the others. And Gabi wanted to knock off the national mint? “You don’t understand the system,” Attila said. “The bigger the bank, the more the security; the more security, the greater the risk. That’s not a job for two people.”

  “Fine,” Gabi said. “Then why don’t we go for two in one day?”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. The first robbery would attract a substantial police response to one part of town, leaving Lajos and crew under-manned to respond to a second hit somewhere else. But Attila wasn’t sure he was up for taking the risk. Maybe the dead lawyer had gotten to him.

  “Come on,” Gabi said. “We could do five in one day if we wanted.”

  “Okay,” Attila said. “But if we get more than fifteen million [$82,000] at Heltai, we don’t do the second one.”

  On Monday morning, March 10, 1997, two policemen in blue commando team jackets and berets blasted through the door of the Heltai Square OTP Bank, weapons drawn, shouting, “Don’t move!”

  All eight customers and ten employees in the bank froze as the lead cop trained his gun on the security guard near the door. “We have information that this man is passing counterfeit money through this bank!” he yelled. The guard put his hands up, and the cop began to read him his rights and strip him of his Browning pistol.

  “Where’s the manager?” the officer called out. “We need to search the safe.”

  The branch manager dutifully appeared from behind the counter with the key in her hand. The officer who had been dealing with the security guard turned and approached her. “Bank robbery,” Attila said, pointing his gun at the woman’s chest with a smile. Gabi, standing at the door, motioned with his gun for the customers and the stunned guard to join him in the middle of the room. “On the floor,” he said. Attila, handcuffs hanging from his policeman’s duty belt, headed to the back.

  It had taken almost a week to get the uniforms in order. Gabi had driven fifty miles north to a police supply store in Slovakia to buy the overalls, jackets, hats, and handcuffs. Then Attila spent two full days with tape and art pens, laying down the white block police lettering and perfectly arched insignia on the breast pocket and across the back of the jackets.

  But as much prep work as they had done in advance, it was impossible to control everything. While Attila had the manager reciting safety codes for him to input along with the key lock, one of the employees on the other side of the bank hit an alarm. Two minutes into the action, a deafening siren pierced the air, accompanied by flashing blood-orange lights posted inside and outside the bank, as Gabi could see from his post at the door. “Time!” he yelled. “Time!”

  Attila had made it down through just two of the four time-lock drawers. He waited about another thirty seconds while his accomplice screamed, then gave up. As planned, they utilized the back exit and within a few seconds were running down an empty alley through a jumble of tall brown apartment buildings to their waiting taxi.

  Lajos (as seen on Kriminális the following evening) was on the scene soon afterward, wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket, dejectedly fishing through a blue Dumpster in the alley. Unbeknownst to him, the Whiskey Robber and his partner had already devoured a plate of kielbasa and sheep’s cheese at their bearskinned headquarters, changed into business suits, toasted—Egészségedre!—and were riding over the Szabadság Bridge in another cab toward the opposite side of town. The morning booty was 9.6 million forints ($52,500), not bad but well short of the 15-million-forint minimum ($82,000) Attila had set.

  It was nearly four o’clock when they arrived at the designated street corner outside the Kelenföld railway station to put the finishing touches on their crime de résistance. The post office down the street already had its metal grating pulled halfway down when they approached. Attila and Gabi, wearing business suits and baseball hats pulled low over long wigs, ducked under the grate to find two female employees pulling on their coats.

  Attila got one of them to open the safe; Gabi watched the other. “It’s going to be fine,” said Gabi, who looked like a psychopath. Two minutes and 4 million forints ($22,000) later, it was over. Attila and Gabi ducked back under the grating, and Attila pulled the chain door down to the ground from the outside. “You shouldn’t leave for ten minutes,” he called to the women inside.

  As they began walking back toward the taxi waiting for them around the corner, they were startled by loud screams emanating from the post office: “Robbers! Robbers! Get them!” Two men passing on the street heard the cries and lunged at the bizarre duo who’d just left the post office, one of whom was carrying an overstuffed plastic bag.

  Gabi took off in one direction, flying past their idling cabdriver, who looked up from his newspaper in bewilderment. Attila ran another direction, drawing, from the sound of it, at least one fleet-footed pursuer. He fled through the neighborhood streets in the darkening day, unable to gain much distance from the man because his dress shoes kept slipping on the pavement. First Attila’s baseball hat, then his shoulder-length straight brown wig, and then his sunglasses flew off his head as he ran, but the footsteps and heavy breathing remained close behind. Then just as he sensed his pursuer beginning to lag, another voice maybe twenty-five feet behind him to the right, yelled, “Freeze, police!” Attila lowered his upper body and braced for a gunshot. Instead, he heard the sound of one man tackling another. “I’m not the robber, you idiot,” a voice groaned. “He’s getting away!”

  Attila turned a corner and kept running through backyards, jumping fences and hurdling shrubs but never letting a forint drop. Twenty-five minutes and four miles later, he arrived back at Villányi Street 112. Gabi was there in the stairwell, still sucking wind, his own wig and hat already ditched in a Dumpster he had passed along the way. They were too exhausted to smile. Hands trembling, A
ttila unlocked the door and leaned back against the frame. Gabi started inside, but Attila pulled him back by the collar. “Shoes,” he said.

  Nineteen

  The day of the double robbery, March 10, was the birthday of Lajos’s wife, Ildikó. Lajos had been working around the clock the past several months in hopes of ingratiating himself with the new police administration and had promised Ildikó a special dinner in their two-room Újpest apartment near the UTE hockey stadium (which he’d been renting at a cut rate from the Interior Ministry).

  Lajos spent the afternoon sifting through rotten fruit in the garbage bins at Heltai Square. Then as dinnertime neared, he was called to a stinking mess on the other side of town, at the site of the Kelenföld post office robbery. There he found the dimwit police officer who had shouted, “Police!” then tackled the man who’d had the best chance in years of catching the Whiskey Robber. The officer was so drunk that he had no recollection of what had transpired. Nor, it turned out, had he ever been a policeman.

  Lajos was despondent. As soon as his bosses picked up a paper in the morning, he was sure his already falling stock was going to plummet. At least the man who had given chase until being sideswiped by the “cop” had been able to lead Lajos to three pieces of evidence the robber had lost during his flight. The first was a white baseball cap with blue-outlined lettering that read levis above the smaller embroidery, AMERICA’S ORIGINAL JEANS. Nearby was a choppily styled long brown wig stiff with gel. And, on a side street, a pair of sunglasses.

  After collecting the items, Lajos headed straight to HQ to hover over the forensics department and begin writing up his report. By the time he paused long enough to remember dinner, it was well after midnight. He fell asleep on the cigarette-singed couch outside his office, hoping Ildikó would forgive him.

  In the morning he phoned home for his castigation and then immediately went to work tracing the evidence his team had gathered at the scene. Keszthelyi sourced the wig through its manufacturer in Korea to the only store in Budapest that carried it: a boutique on Váci Street. But the only male customer the owner remembered was a man who came in saying he needed three wigs for a Beatles cover band minus a George, and there was no receipt for the sale.