Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

by Julian Rubinstein

  The Levis hat turned out to be an officially trademarked edition. According to the company, it was one of only 308 such caps that had been shipped to Hungary, which meant it had almost certainly been sold from one of the company’s four Budapest outlets. Yet while this discovery sounded good for about ten minutes, it turned out to be the most common type of robbery department lead. It meant nothing because there was no way to follow up.

  So Lajos turned once again to his most promising investigative tool. He phoned the Kriminális offices and offered up the Whiskey Robber’s disguise to László Juszt as long as the television host would show a phone number for viewers to call with tips. The following week Juszt displayed the accessories on his program, and once again the robbery department was bathing in leads.

  On March 20 Keszthelyi had the pleasure of spending two hours with thirty-six-year-old Ágnes Hornyák, a Kriminális viewer who showed up at the robbery offices with what she said was “important information.” Hornyák said she had closely observed three perpetrators before the robbery at Heltai Square. “They are the heads of three gangs who will soon hit all the post offices in Budapest at the same time and rob them all,” she told Keszthelyi. “I can help because I always have a camera and I can take photos.”

  “Although I’m not a psychiatrist,” Keszthelyi wrote in his summary of Hornyák’s visit, “this lady shows definite signs of being on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I am 100 percent sure she had no idea what she was talking about.”

  One man phoned to say that a few days before the robbery, he was at the Goldberg Pub, where he overheard two men discussing how to make fake police jackets to rob a bank at Heltai Square. Lajos was able to get the new police chief to approve a shortwave radio for the pub, and the wait staff was instructed how to use it to contact the police in case either of the men appeared on the premises again.

  Several people, all with prior criminal records, were taken into custody, including the first of many sets of brothers erroneously linked to the case, József and Lajos Budai. But they were released after going unrecognized in the police lineups staged at the Gyorskocsi Street jail, the city’s famous clink where Imre Nagy, the hero of the 1956 revolution, had been hanged.

  Finally, on April 21 the robbery department appeared to get the break it had been waiting for. A call came from a guard at the Tököl juvenile prison on Csepel Island, the strip of land in the middle of the Danube River as it enters Budapest from the south. A credible inmate claimed to know the identities of both the Whiskey Robber and his accomplice. Keszthelyi and Mound borrowed a police car and made the half-hour drive to Tököl, where they met the juvenile institute’s oldest prisoner, thirty-five-year-old László Klányi.

  Klányi had been sentenced to four years in prison in June of 1996 for fraud. He was serving his time at the juvenile facility because he had a serious leg injury that needed further treatment and Tököl had just hired a new orthopedic specialist, the well-regarded former UTE hockey team doctor, Attila Tóth.

  When Keszthelyi and Mound arrived, Klányi was waiting in the visitation room behind a glass panel. He told the detectives that before he was convicted the previous year, one of his friends had confessed to him that he was the Whiskey Robber and had even admitted that he was going to rob a bank and leave a red rose and a letter. Klányi proceeded to describe both the Whiskey Robber and his accomplice in detail. He said he had even seen the police uniforms used at the Heltai Square OTP Bank robbery and the wigs. “They asked me to join, but I refused because of my family,” Klányi said. “I was going to be the driver.”

  Keszthelyi and Mound took Klányi into another room and showed him the discount-bin security-camera video they’d brought of the bank robbery on Lajos Street in June 1995. “That’s him,” Klányi said. “He is the brain behind everything. You have to be careful when you go to get him because he won’t hesitate to use his gun. And he’s very fast. Like a grasshopper.”

  That night Keszthelyi led commando units into the apartments of both men Klányi had identified. They were booked and brought to police headquarters. The suspects certainly fit the descriptions of the Whiskey Robber and his accomplice, and in the first apartment, as Klányi had described, Keszthelyi found a police uniform, two wigs, and a likely excuse. “I used to be a police officer,” said thirty-four-year-old János Kis. “And if you want me to try on my mother-in-law’s wigs, I will.”

  “If you’re not the Whiskey Robber,” Keszthelyi asked, “why would [Klányi] accuse you?”

  “I don’t know,” Kis said. “I should report him for this.”

  The apartment of the other suspect, in Szentendre near the Cats Club, was the home of forty-two-year-old breadmaker Józsi Benedek. It was suspiciously clean of evidence.

  The pair was held while Keszthelyi frantically sought other corroborating data and witnesses. For the next two days, he, Lajos, and Mound pored through police records and conducted nearly a dozen interviews.

  Kis, it turned out, really had been not only a cop but also a Parliament guard, which meant that he had some specialized knowledge of police and security methods that could have helped him stay ahead of the law and perhaps to have a police uniform or two lying around. With his bushy mustache, curly hair, wide symmetrical face, and easygoing manner, he indubitably fit the images and descriptions the police had of the Whiskey Robber. Famous among his peers for wearing nothing but sweatsuits and slippers, Kis was described by one associate as “a nice person but he drinks his portion.”

  The baker was more of an enigma. Known throughout the pubs of Szentendre as Dadogós Józsi, or Stuttering Józsi, he clearly spent a good deal of time with Kis. But none of the robbery witnesses had ever mentioned a stutterer.

  Keszthelyi didn’t go home for two days. On the second night, while digging through the police employment archive, he found the missing link he needed: motive. Kis, it turned out, had been fired from the police department for stealing mountain bikes on his off days. He might well have an axe to grind with the force.

  Lajos was intrigued, but he wanted Keszthelyi to drive down to the juvenile prison to reinterview Klányi. If they were going to close the book on the Whiskey Robber case, they had to be sure they had the right guys. Unfortunately, Keszthelyi’s second visit with Klányi raised more questions than it answered. Klányi, too, seemed to have an axe to grind—with his old friend Kis. Klányi kept mentioning to Keszthelyi that Kis was also profiting from the fraud for which Klányi was convicted. “I didn’t mention that at my court hearing,” Klányi said.

  Later that afternoon, back in Budapest, Keszthelyi interviewed Klányi’s ex-wife. She told Keszthelyi how Klányi’s leg had been mangled. Klányi’s friend Kis was at least partly to blame. Klányi had been riding on the back of Kis’s motorcycle when Kis had gotten into an accident. Now Keszthelyi had a better context for Klányi’s apparent hostility toward the man he claimed was the Whiskey Robber. But it didn’t mean Klányi was lying.

  “Do you think I should trust your ex-husband?” Keszthelyi asked Klányi’s former wife.

  “He’s a complete liar,” she responded. “You can’t even believe what he asks.”

  Keszthelyi’s head was spinning until late that afternoon, when he got an unexpected tip that helped clear things up about Kis, Klányi, and Stuttering Józsi: while that trio was still locked up, the Whiskey Robber and his partner had hit again. And this time the details of the robbery were somewhat heartening. Upon learning how little money was in the safe, the “gentleman bandit” had begun racing up and down the bank’s small foyer, screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! The life, the LIFE! It’s unbelievable! I’m too old for this shit!”

  At least, Keszthelyi thought, he wasn’t the only one losing his mind.

  Attila was twenty-nine years old. He was a hockey goalie and a building superintendent. He had a beautiful Székely girlfriend. He lived in Budapest. He was, as far as he could tell, the most prolific and well known thief in Eastern Europe. Except for cleaning the stairwell of his apartm
ent building and taking out the trash once a week, he had the life he’d thought he wanted. He was the well-loved star of the most popular TV show in Hungary. He was rich. And yet he was going mad.

  He hadn’t been able to sleep since the day two months earlier when he’d almost been caught running from the scene of the second of he and Gabi’s two robberies. He’d spent many of those nights imagining Betty asking where he’d put that Levis hat she’d bought him—or worse, her seeing it on television in the hands of László Juszt. Attila was so consumed by keeping up on where the police stood with the investigation that he often arrived at 5:00 a.m. at his pal Frici’s newsstand to get the papers. And with his friend Dr. Tóth now working up at Tököl prison, Attila was so paranoid that he had started checking medical journals out of the library in hopes of self-diagnosing his deteriorating stomach condition rather than see a strange doctor.

  The last thing he needed was to be told that the bank he was in the process of robbing had just emptied the bulk of its coffers into an armored vehicle for deposit. But that’s what had happened during his last robbery. He left the OTP with just 1.5 million forints ($8,200), his worst showing since the debacle at the Ó Street travel agency three years ago. Subtracting Gabi’s share, it was his lowest take since December 1993. When he and Gabi had gotten back to his apartment, Attila was still fuming. “I’m not getting caught with a couple of hundred thousand forints,” he said, taking back Gabi’s gun and giving him the few cardboard clips from the bill bundles to burn. “I’m not going to look like some loser, some novice. I’d rather shoot myself in the head.”

  Attila’s twenty-three-year-old partner was also losing his edge, though he’d been at the game for only eight months. Gabi didn’t tell Attila, but while Attila was having his meltdown inside the bank, Gabi realized he’d forgotten to spray the video camera. Fortunately, when he remembered, he saw that the camera’s cord was hanging loose along the wall. It wasn’t even plugged in. “Shitty OTP,” he’d muttered, kicking a dent in the bank’s cheap wall.

  The partners had agreed that although they couldn’t end their careers on such a sour note, they had to shut down the business. They both had substance-abuse problems, digestive trouble, and anger-management issues. They couldn’t take it anymore, and neither, it should be mentioned, could their girlfriends, who were sick of the boys’ foul moods, unexpected absences, and monopoly on the bathrooms. Attila and Gabi decided they would do one more job—Attila’s twenty-second, including the single failed attempt at the train station travel agency in 1993—and call it a career.

  Attila steeled himself for one last round of preparations. It would be his and Gabi’s eighth robbery in nine months. He found a department store outside town where he could buy wigs. He re-examined his robbery book as if it were the last skin mag in the Milky Way. He even snooped around the Interior Ministry garages to see which precincts had more squad cars in for repairs. And then he made his decision. They would go after the same OTP Bank on Grassalkovich Street, in the southern industrial Pest outskirts, that they’d robbed after buying their trip to the Dominican Republic. It was a sleepy area, it was farthest from a police precinct, and two of the cop cars from the district were out of service.

  On May 27 Attila dropped Betty off at Éva’s, went home, and started drinking. At eight o’clock the next morning, Gabi showed up to find the door to the apartment unlocked and Attila asleep with the lights on and a wig draped over the lampshade. After waking his partner, Gabi played the role of the guard for their dress rehearsals. Then they pulled their business suits over their clothing, painted their mustaches, fastened their wigs to their heads, and headed out for the grand finale.

  Twelve customers were inside when they entered the bank. Attila started anyway, pouncing on the guard and taking his gun. Gabi remembered to spray the camera. Attila finished before Gabi could call time. If an alarm had been activated, it was silent. Attila locked the door to the bank from the outside with the key the manager had given him, and he and Gabi walked swiftly back to their waiting cab. “To the HÉV, please,” Attila told the driver, referring to the southern station of the city’s aboveground train network. In the concourse bathroom, they slipped out of their sports jackets and dress shirts, transferred the plastic bags of money into the Camel duffel, and hopped onto the train heading back toward the city. Attila could tell by the weight of the bag that it had been a big score. As the train slid north past Grassalkovich Street, he looked wistfully out the window at the police cars surrounding the bank. Someone tapped his arm. “Can you imagine having that kind of courage?” a woman next to him said, nodding at the cordoned-off crime scene. “I bet that’s the Whiskey Robber.” Attila was going to miss robbing.

  The next day, before he picked up Betty but after he and Gabi had counted up a record 25-million-forint haul ($138,000), Attila pulled a batch of guns out of his oven, most of which were pieces that had been fleeced from bank guards. He dismantled them on the floor, dropped them into a sack, and waited for Gabi to show up. They got into Attila’s red Toyota Land Cruiser and drove south past the Danube’s Csepel Island, past the abandoned factory buildings, then the sandy dunes sprouting grape vines, until neither the city nor the pollution cloud around it was visible. At a remote section of the road, Attila pulled over to the shoulder. He and Gabi tramped through the muddy reeds and mosquitoes to the bank of the river, where one by one, they tossed the tools of their former trade into the brackish, still water.

  Twenty

  So they’re dealing with this Whiskey Robber again,” the man with the newspaper in the backseat said to the taxi driver.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” the driver said, weaving through traffic along Stefánia Street near Heroes’ Square.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes.

  “What would you do if he got into your cab?” the passenger asked.

  “I would probably recognize him,” said the mustachioed driver, who himself bore a resemblance to the thief. “But I’ve never seen anyone similar.”

  “Where do you think he goes, the casinos?” asked the mustachioed passenger.

  “Probably,” said the driver, looking in the rearview mirror at his fare. The man in the backseat had long dark hair under a baseball hat and bushy eyebrows sticking out of his Ray-Ban sunglasses. “I don’t mind playing the tables a bit myself,” the driver offered.

  “Really?” his passenger asked. “What’s your game?”

  “I like them all,” the driver said. “Blackjack, roulette.”

  The cab pulled up to downtown’s Deák Square. “The corner here is fine,” the passenger said, digging into his pocket with effort. “Can you hold this for a minute so I can get my wallet?” he asked the driver, passing him a half-empty can of Coca-Cola. A moment later the man in the backseat pulled out a thousand-forint bill ($5.50) and handed it over the seat. The driver gave him back the Coke. “Thanks,” the passenger said. “Good day.”

  Then Lajos Varjú climbed out of the back of the cab, hurried down the pedestrian underpass and back out the other side in front of police headquarters, where, once inside, he pulled off his wig, hat, and sunglasses, and rushed the Coke can to forensics to be tested for finger-prints. Unfortunately, the mask of desperation he wore was his own.

  That summer Lajos and his robbery team became the last Budapest police division to vacate the hundred-year-old downtown headquarters next to Planet of the Zorg and relocate to a tinted-glass space needle in northern Budapest. The new nine-story HQ, topped with radar towers and satellite dishes, was an impressive sight, particularly as it was set on the edge of the city’s largest communist-era housing block, a colorless diorama that resembled a meeting of disorderly cereal boxes. Locals quickly dubbed the sleek new police palace the Death Star. Indeed, image was everything. In order to get out of the state-of-the-art structure’s parking garage, Keszthelyi once had to dismantle the malfunctioning parking arm that drooped down after the passage of each car. And because several hundred million forints had
allegedly been embezzled from the construction fund, the building’s design plans had to be altered in progress. Instead of a seamless cylindrical design, the new HQ was completed in the shape of one wide half cylinder abutted by another much narrower half cylinder. It was a true testament to just how little anything had changed.

  For Lajos, however, the new surroundings were invigorating, at least briefly. After working the city’s busiest beat from an oversize closet overlooking a band of outlaw ragamuffins, he would command his 103-member division from a spacious, carpeted office with a view of the one-bedroom apartment Hungarian rapper Gangsta Zoli shared with his mother. In contrast to what Lajos had become accustomed to at the old HQ, thinking like a cop no longer required an active imagination or a lukewarm tonic. His new digs featured an arrestee tank, entire hallways lined with one-way-mirrored interrogation rooms, and a press center stocked with pretzels and refrigerated beer in which he would soon long to swim.

  With Sándor Pintér and his cronies off the police force and the next year’s national elections in sight, Prime Minister Horn had underscored his commitment to winning Hungary’s war on crime. Aside from promising an end to the crime wave, Horn created an expanded public relations department and a new special operations force, the KBI (Központi Bnüldözési Igazgatóság, or Central Criminal Office). The KBI, also known as the Hungarian FBI, quickly arrested the owners of Attila’s preferred auto dealership, Conti-Car, on organized crime charges, a bust that resulted in an internal staffwide police request that the ubiquitous “I Love Conti-Car” stickers be removed from all police cars and offices. But it was the KBI’s follow-up bulletin that began to ruin Lajos’s mood. The blueprints for the new police headquarters building had been stolen from the KBI director’s car, and the KBI was warning that a group of mafiosos linked to the arrested Conti-Car kingpins had phoned and faxed the Death Star to report that they were about to destroy the building with shoulder-fired missiles. With his marriage suffering from a lack of attentiveness, Lajos had hoped the new green velvet couch in his office might offer him comfort in times of need, not a cushioned landing in case of a projectile attack.