In another part of the city that Saturday morning, Éva Fodor was at the Keleti train station, seeing her mother off after a visit from her home in the countryside. As they were walking through the concourse, the back page of Mai Nap jumped off the newsstand at her:
WHISKEY ROBBER CAUGHT?
IS THE UTE GOALIE THE ONE SOUGHT FOR YEARS?
Suddenly Éva felt as though she couldn’t breathe. She hurried her mother onto the train, then sat down on a bench inside the station, dizzy. Hundreds of pieces of a puzzle were swirling into place in her head.
Later that day Attila was transported by van across the Danube to his sixth home since arriving in Hungary eleven years earlier: the city’s oldest and largest jail, on Gyorskocsi Street, final resting place of 1956 hero Imre Nagy. Built in 1907, the red and brown brick building took up a whole city block in the center of downtown Buda, just two blocks off the Danube River, directly across from Parliament and not far from the spot where Attila leapt off the ledge the previous afternoon, temporarily shaking the police. From the outside, the jail could easily have been mistaken for a century-old four-story office building, save for the barely visible black bars set into the square windows on the upper three floors.
Attila was assigned to one of the two hundred identical, small, square cement-floored cells. The room was appointed with two steel beds, a sink, and a lidless toilet. His cellmate introduced himself as Killer. Three times a day a tray containing a purported meal was pushed through the slot in the wooden door.
Attila couldn’t remember when he’d felt so welcome. Aside from his almost daily interrogations in the adjacent administration building, he was allowed out of his cell two times a day, once for a shower and again for the morning walk outside in a cement-walled box in the building’s inner courtyard. Like the others, until convicted, Attila could wear his own clothing, a bag of which was ferried to him by the police after an unenlightening search of his Rezeda Street apartment. There was no television, but his cellmate had a radio; and Attila found the guards more than willing to bring him the newspapers, all of which were filled with his story. Magyar Hírlap wrote that he and Gabi were “the century’s most persistent, cautious and most wanted armed robbers…. If it is proven true that Attila Ambrus is the noted Whiskey Robber, then one-fifth of the robberies in the capital are on his account.” The article went on to describe Attila as a “strikingly intelligent man, who pays attention to every detail, who is definitely daring, who was courteous in the beginning but became harsher in his methods toward the end.” The nation’s largest and most respected newspaper, Népszabadság, referred to Attila as “the master.” Attila’s fellow inmates at Gyorskocsi dubbed him simply “the King.”
He didn’t request bail, a lawyer, or even a phone call.
Now that Attila and Gabi had been arrested and charged, a new team of police investigators was responsible for preparing the case for trial. The five-member unit, headed by thirty-seven-year-old Colonel Zsolt Bérdi, met each morning on the fourth floor at the southeast end of the jail.
Bérdi, a medium-size man who wore suits three sizes too big and spoke only in a whisper, did not always have an easy time impressing his concerns upon his staff. And he had some very big concerns about this case. For starters, it wasn’t just the prison population that was treating Attila like a film star. When reporters got wind that Attila had been captured at the border with his dog, several tabloids wrote that it was the Whiskey Robber’s devotion to his pet that led to his arrest. In response, more than a thousand people phoned the Death Star offering to adopt Don, among them the cabaret and television star Zsuzsa Csala, who quickly became a vocal Whiskey Robber advocate. “Here’s a guy who dares to rob directly,” Csala said to the media of Attila. “He’s not hiding and he’s not denying. He’s confessed to everything. Actually, he’s even helping the fact-finding. This is rare in our society. Where I live [in the Buda hills], I’m surrounded by crooks. One of them has built a bobsled track. Another has a moat. You have to approach the house by boat. There’s no way you can get this money in a respectable way. They’re all robbers.”
Bérdi looked at Attila’s case through a different lens. What kind of person, he wanted to know, admitted to committing twenty-six robberies? Attila had even confessed to an attempted robbery back in 1993 at the Nyugati train station travel agency. Bérdi had never seen such a thing. He didn’t trust Attila and he wasn’t going to let himself or his investigative department be played the way the robber had played the robbery department for the past six years.
At his daily 8:00 a.m. meetings, seated at a long wooden table upon which two black miniature FBI flags flew from a pencil holder, Bérdi told his team that while it was indeed good news that Attila was still maintaining his complete guilt, they could not lose their focus. If the thief backed out of his confession, they had almost nothing to go on except an extended vacation, because they would surely be fired. “Where’s the hundred and forty-five million forints?” Bérdi whispered, referring to the approximately $600,000 total Attila and his accomplices had snatched over the past six years. “Do you really believe he’s squandered all of it at the casinos?”
Valter Fülöp, the handsome young lead investigator who had been questioning Attila, was a believer. “It’s possible,” he told Bérdi. “He’s an adrenaline addict. He told me he loved nothing more than hearing the police car sirens when he was robbing a bank.”
“Don’t fall under his spell,” Bérdi emitted. “Remember, this guy shot at police officers. We need to look at proving attempted murder. But don’t tell Attila. We can’t afford to lose his trust or cooperation.”
Attila and Gabi didn’t see each other for six days after their arrests. Bérdi wanted them kept on separate floors to ensure that they couldn’t coordinate their stories. That was fine with Gabi, who had no idea if Attila held him responsible for his capture and wasn’t looking forward to finding out.
On Thursday, January 21, Gabi was led down to a small empty holding cell. A few minutes later the door was unlocked and Attila was pushed into the room. As the door closed behind him, Attila looked at his flinching partner and smiled. “Here I am,” Attila said. “It’s what it is.”
The reason the two UTE players had been brought together that morning wasn’t clear until they were ushered into another larger room, where three other men were standing in handcuffs, guarded by two jail officials. As soon as Attila and Gabi entered, one of the cuffed men made a run at Attila, flailing at him with his scrawny arms, which were latched together at the wrists. “Why didn’t you send a message,” the pipsqueak shouted. It was Péter Szcs. Brother Gyula also made a feeble attempt to swipe at Attila, but he’d recently contracted tuberculosis from his cellmate and was so weak, he could barely wipe his own ass.
The Szcs brothers had been Whiskey Robber fans before their arrest and had been convinced that once the bandit heard that they had been charged with some of his crimes, he would get word to the police of their innocence. Instead, not only did no word come, but no new vindicating robberies came and the Szcses had spent the past ten months in jail. (Hungary had no limit on how long the accused could be kept in custody; one man spent more than a year awaiting trial on charges of stealing 138 rolls of toilet paper.)
After a guard jumped in to pull Péter off him, Attila apologized. “Bocsánat,” Attila said to Péter. Sorry. And he really was, but he also didn’t know what the Szcses were still doing there. It had been almost a week since he had confessed to the crimes with which they were charged.
As soon as the room was back under control, the guards began to pass out white placards numbered one to five and asked the men to stand facing the glass. It was a lineup. On the other side of the one-way glass was a group of witnesses from the Heltai Square OTP robbery, recalled for another look at possible culprits. For an hour Attila, Gabi, Péter, Gyula, and an undercover cop were handed a variety of cheap wigs, plastic glasses, tall felt hats, and fake adhesiveless black mustaches that required them
to pucker their lips in order to keep on their face. While a police photographer snapped shots with a Polaroid, the five men traded disguises, shuffled places, and repeated phrases, including “Bank robbery,” and “Don’t you dare hit the alarm like last year,” which were overheard during the second of the two robberies at Heltai Square, nearly a year earlier.
Now that Attila and Gabi were in the tank along with the Szcs brothers, several key witnesses from the robbery, including Ferenc Laczik, the plainclothes cop who had chased after the robber that day at Heltai Square, were adamant about the perpetrators’ identities: according to Laczik, the main perpetrator, identified by his placard number, was the diminutive, unathletic Gyula Szcs. When the order of the lineup was switched and the hats but not the wigs, mustaches, or glasses were removed, Ferenc’s conviction did not waver. As he said before, it was the one standing second from the left: Péter Szcs.
That afternoon Bérdi made an assessment he hadn’t expected to make. He determined the Whiskey Robber’s word to be more credible than the memory of one of the case’s best witnesses—a cop, to boot—and thus ordered the Szcs brothers’ release.
Twenty-seven
Despite the level of public interest in the case, it was three weeks before the Hungarian public was able to see Attila speak for himself, because that was how long it took for Bérdi and Kriminális host László Juszt to agree to the terms of Attila’s first television interview. Juszt had been holding out to do the show live from Attila’s jail cell while he and Attila sipped whiskey, but eventually he consented to taping the interview in Bérdi’s office (where Attila would appear without handcuffs) and merely presenting the robber with a bottle of whiskey that would remain unopened.
The special edition of Kriminális aired in prime time on Wednesday, February 10, at the end of a news cycle that, even by Hungarian standards, was remarkable. The previous Tuesday one of the country’s most dangerous criminals, György Döcher, was assassinated while having coffee at a downtown café. The next day preliminary disciplinary proceedings were launched against the prison official who had permitted Döcher to step away from his jail cell for an afternoon refreshment.
Then on Monday Márta Tocsik, the lawyer who had presided over the Scandal of the Century, was found not guilty on all charges. And earlier in the day of Juszt’s Whiskey Robber interview, the police launched a massive investigation into the financial improprieties of Gábor Princz, one of the best-known and wealthiest Hungarians, who had famously run Hungary’s largest bank chain, Postabank, into the ground and stuck the Hungarian government with a 152-billion-forint ($652 million) bailout bill while he fled to Vienna.
But that night one-third of the country tuned in for Juszt’s Barbara Walters–style sit-down with the Whiskey Robber. After the Kriminális theme, Juszt appeared at his podium in the newsroom and introduced the night’s show by calling Attila’s story a “serial fairy tale.” Then he rolled the tape of his interview from earlier that day at the jail.
The cameras followed the beefy Juszt, dressed in an olive double-breasted suit and yellow designer tie, into Bérdi’s dowdy, dark office, where the Whiskey Robber was leaning against an empty bookshelf as if waiting on a librarian to return with his periodical. Wearing a peach-colored button-down and three-day-old stubble, Attila looked relaxed and rested; his short dark hair was combed and slightly wet from a recent shower. Juszt, grinning like a politician, handed him a bottle of Macallan whiskey, “just to be stylish. Unfortunately, we cannot drink it together.”
Reaching out for the bottle, Attila laughed, showing his deep cheek dimples. Köszönöm szépen, he said. Thank you very much. He was more handsome and telegenic than even Juszt could have hoped.
The two men sat down in Bérdi’s office. “I’m glad to finally meet you,” Juszt said, beginning the interview. “We’ve worked together for so many years.”
Attila spoke briefly of a hopeless childhood in Romania, characterizing his escape into Hungary as a second chance, a shot at a better life that never materialized despite his best legal efforts. “I did everything,” Attila said of his job history. “I don’t have a skill for anything, but I did everything.” He was humble and reflective, and though his background said one thing, he neither looked nor sounded anything like a former animal-pelt smuggler who’d never finished high school and had just landed in the slammer.
Twice during the half-hour interview, Juszt suggested that Attila’s style was like Robin Hood, but Attila wouldn’t accept the comparison. “I’m a criminal,” Attila said. “But the goal was not to get money at all costs. There were many cases where I was in a situation where I could have shot somebody or been shot, but the most important thing was that there would be no violence, no blood. If the situation got too hot, I just took off…. But I really want to emphasize that I’m very sorry. I didn’t want to, but I did point my gun at some people. I may not have caused physical injury, but there was surely a psychological reaction, and I am apologizing to them now.”
Attila hit every note perfectly without even sounding as if he was trying. He sidestepped the folk-hero comparison as ably as he painted his case in political terms. Asked by Juszt what type of prison sentence he expected, Attila said, “I know about [Márta] Tocsik, for example. The two cases have nothing to do with each other. But she took money from the state. I took money from the state. It’s not my place to judge, but she was released. I know I will not be released. I’m expecting ten or eleven years.”
By the end of the interview, Attila’s sincerity and poise had surrounded him with a sheen of moral clarity. By comparison, his interviewer appeared fawning and awkward. Noting that the newspapers had previously reported that Attila had been to see his play, the Kriminális Cabaret, Juszt asked what Attila thought of the production. “I don’t want to be too personal about it,” Attila said, “but I think if someone is a reporter, he should be a reporter. For instance, I am a bank robber, so I don’t try to be a gravedigger, though, actually, I used to be a gravedigger. But I don’t try to be Tolstoy. It was good, but I thought it was too slow.”
To end the program, Juszt turned to the camera, saying simply, “He was the Whiskey Robber.”
Not surprisingly, the Kriminális interview was a public relations hat trick for Attila. He came off as handsome, intelligent, articulate, courageous, self-effacing, and even penitent—not exactly qualities Hungarians associated with someone sitting in jail or, for that matter, elected office. Yet despite all of his star qualities, Attila also appeared unmistakably like so many of his countrymen—another guy who had struggled to make a life for himself in an unfair system. As unlikely as it was, the man behind the legend of the Whiskey Robber actually seemed to live up to the myth.
Budapest’s bars and coffeehouses buzzed with tributes to Hungary’s “modern-day Sándor Rózsa,” the eighteenth-century Hungarian Robin Hood. Gangsta Zoli, moved by the audacity of his occasional drinking companion, began writing a new single that would soon climb the charts, “The Whiskey Robber Is the King.” Even some of the victims of Attila’s robberies came to his defense. “It’s a shame we were hit at the beginning,” one of the tellers from an early post office robbery told Mai Nap, “because we didn’t get the flowers.”
For the next month Attila lived out a fantasy. After what felt like a lifetime forcing himself not to talk—first under Ceauescu in Romania and then as a hunted criminal in Hungary—he was free to say anything he wanted. And for the first time in his life, everyone wanted to hear what he had to say. Almost every day he received, and accepted, a media request. He sat down for interviews in room 309 of the jail’s adjacent administration building with all three of Hungary’s major television networks and every newspaper. Back in his cell, he yapped so incessantly that his cellmate, Killer, who signed his letters to his wife in blood, finally threatened to stab Attila if he didn’t shut up (which worked).
Because Attila was feeling so chatty and still had no lawyer, Bérdi seized the opportunity to ask if he would agree t
o speak with a forensic psychologist as part of the investigation. Attila not only obliged, he filled up the doctor’s notebook. At the end of one several-page-long answer in which Attila described to the shrink his hockey career, his childhood, and his odd job history, the psychologist wrote in the margin of her notes: “Only asked about physical injuries!”
Gabi, on the other hand, who had had no contact with Attila since the Szcs lineup, was a far more reticent resident of the jail. There were still two robberies of the thirteen he had committed that he was maintaining he didn’t remember, even when investigators prompted him with such details as a loaf of bread in the safe and a cigar bomb on the counter. And after the publication of Gabi’s interview with the daily newspaper Népszabadság, his lawyer, Péter Bárándy, the president of the prestigious Budapest Chamber of Lawyers and the country’s future justice minister, advised his client against talking to the media ever again. Perhaps it was Gabi’s description of life on the run that prompted his lawyer’s concern: “It was so exciting, seeing the huge-lettered headlines on the front pages about the Whiskey Robber,” Gabi told Népszabadság. “And I’m sitting there with the front-page guy. We’re friends! We’re partners! And I know things that any cop would give his arm for!”
In March, when the media’s golden glare began to recede, Attila got a good look at his new, lonely reality. He was surrounded by metal bars, guards, investigators, and boxes of chocolate and love letters sent by anonymous admirers. But none of his friends or hockey teammates had come to visit. He assumed that his former compatriots were tired of being interrogated about him, especially since he hadn’t been such a good friend the past couple of years. The last time he’d seen Éva, a few weeks before his arrest, he’d stomped out of her house after screaming about the money she owed him. And as for Bubu, it was unlikely Attila could have reached him even if he had tried: his old billiards companion was now an investor in a group of brothels, a career move that had made him so paranoid that he had changed his phone number and traveled around town only alongside his six feet six Székely business partner, both of them packing loaded pistols under their leather jackets.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber Page 26