As he did when he first dedicated himself to becoming a robber—after nearly getting caught attempting to rob the travel agency at the train station in 1993—Attila put himself on a strict regimen designed specifically for only one purpose: to triumph over his pursuers by intuiting their movements and exploiting their weaknesses. Every day, he spent two to three hours doing push-ups, sit-ups, and leg-sits, a minimum of a thousand each. He’d already acquired one gun, using Domonkos as an intermediary, and now he got another. He placed them on opposite corners of the wooden frame under the futon he slept on, one near his right hand, the other near his left foot so that he was never more than a split second away from protection.
During the days, he crawled around on the floor like a crab, careful to keep his head below window level. At night he sat on the small cement balcony in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the street below. He never used more than a small reading lamp on the floor. He did crossword puzzles to stay relaxed. But as the weeks passed, the pressure of being on the run with nowhere to run was getting to him. He’d left one cell and was now a virtual prisoner in another. He felt worse than he did that summer in 1995 when he was caught on camera at the Lajos Street bank. Attila allowed himself to drink every other night, and when he did, he usually finished two whole bottles of whiskey by the time the sun came up, hallucinating about the halcyon days as UTE’s Zamboni driver. But he had a responsibility to the people now.
Attila tried to recount the pages in his robbery book that he’d flushed down the gas station toilet in January. He could picture almost every entry, but the problem was, there wasn’t much left worth remembering. By the end with Gabi, there weren’t any easy targets left that they hadn’t already done. And Attila knew his next hit couldn’t be a site he’d done before: the police would have all of those bases covered by now. He decided to bide his time until things cooled down a little and he might be able to sneak out for some location scouting.
That left Attila with nothing to do but keep up his workouts and follow his saga in the media. He read the papers every third day, when Domonkos arrived to restock his food and reading materials. And on television, he followed the latest on the manhunt, a pastime that required nothing more than lying inanimately on the floor and consenting to being dragged through unpredictable emotional terrain. Sometimes the news of his story made him laugh out loud, such as when he watched a prominent television journalist call the Whiskey Robber case “the Monica Lewinsky story of Hungary” because of how embarrassing it had become for the government. Sometimes it made him sad, such as when the guest on Sunrise was his dog, Don. Sometimes he was amazed, such as when his lawyer went on television to announce his completion of a deal with an Austrian company to produce Whiskey Robber energy drinks. And often it made him angry, such as when he saw special reports that belittled his past, claiming that he had had “numerous brushes with the law” earlier in life and that, once he got rich, he had “failed to provide for his impoverished parents in Transylvania.”
Only rarely did the news inform him of the progress of the police, but when it did—such as on September 1—it was always heartening. On that day Attila watched as every channel carried live coverage of the police shutting down and sealing the Flórián shopping mall at the foot of the city’s northernmost river crossing, the Árpád Bridge, because he was supposedly inside. They were still chasing shadows.
In the third week of September, Attila finally steeled himself to go out. He shaved his scruffy beard into a Fu Manchu, put on a baseball hat, and took public transportation to a motorcycle dealership on the southern outskirts of town, where he paid cash for a moped. He drove in the direction of Budapest’s tiny international airport, Ferihegy, fifteen miles southeast of the city. A few miles beyond the airport, he turned down a dirt road into the town of Vecsés, home of the celebrated Vecsési káposzta, or pickled cabbage, and one humble OTP Bank. Attila wasn’t sure how much money it would carry, but he was sure it wasn’t in the jurisdiction of the Budapest police. He didn’t want any part of Keszthelyi. He knew the robbery chief well enough to know that this case was personal for him; Keszthelyi wasn’t very easily going to be made the fool again.
After locating the OTP in a shopping plaza off the main road, Attila ferreted out the local police precinct house. At one minute and forty-five seconds doing 60 mph, the bank was a bit closer to the police station than he’d hoped. But he didn’t think it was likely to be equipped with a direct alarm to the station, like those in the city. Plus, it was real small. He would be in and out.
He parked the scooter at a McDonald’s on the other end of the little shopping center and went to check the layout. Mentally, he wasn’t ready to do the job right away, but he didn’t want to go home, either, now that he was finally out of Domonkos’s apartment. After his assessment, he got back on the bike and drove into a nearby wooded area, where he spent the night under the stars. In the morning he awoke with the sun and drove west, across the Danube River to Érd, where Éva lived. He had to be careful. She was an obvious target for surveillance. But he needed to see a familiar face and she was the only one he felt sure he could trust.
Éva’s neighborhood was a hilly and heavily wooded area. When Attila got near her street, he walked the bike up the road and sneaked onto her property through the trees. He didn’t see any suspicious cars around, so he darted toward the house, where, through a window, he could see Éva inside on the couch watching television. For a moment he had to wonder what his life would have been like had he not let those 2 million forints ride on black 17 the night before he and Éva were supposed to close on the pub. Then he knocked on the glass.
Éva was shocked. She’d figured Attila was in Transylvania by now. She yanked him inside and shooed him upstairs. Though she hadn’t seen it for the past few days, an unmarked car with two men in it had been parked just down the street for weeks. And thank God he was smart enough not to have called. The phone, with all those strange clicks, was surely tapped. But it was a most excellent reunion—in almost every way. Éva was dating another man, with whom she was getting serious. She wasn’t going to sleep with Attila, but she would let him stay for a week if he promised not to leave the house or use the phone. For Attila the sex thing was a serious buzzkill, but he would have to adjust if he wanted to enjoy the pleasures of freedom even briefly. He spent most of the days in Éva’s loftlike upper floor, playing pool on the competition-size table he’d helped her acquire a couple of years earlier.
Attila’s hair had grown in since he’d shaved it at János’s place, and, as he was talking about needing to transform his appearance, Éva had a suggestion. Her son, an eighteen-year-old aspiring hairstylist whom Attila knew, was a huge Whiskey Robber fan, and she was sure he would give Attila a makeover free of charge. Attila agreed, and Éva’s son came over and dyed his hero’s hair and eyebrows peroxide blond, transforming him into a stockier Billy Idol. Attila looked like a new person, and he had a new idea. On one of his last days at Éva’s place, he took a white T-shirt from one of her drawers and drew on it with a black Magic Marker:*
Then Attila wrote a note to his lawyer with a request he assumed Magyar wouldn’t mind granting. When he heard about a robbery on the outskirts of Budapest, Attila wrote in his note to Magyar, he should phone the police, tell them it was the work of the Whiskey Robber, and then deliver the T-shirt and a special message to them, which Attila enclosed. Then he gave the shirt and the note to Éva and told her to get them to Magyar right away.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 28, Attila kissed Éva goodbye and drove out to the OTP Bank in Vecsés to look it over one last time. He’d taken a bottle of whiskey with him from Éva’s cupboard and gone to the train tracks nearby to drink and wait until it was almost closing time. He finished off the entire bottle and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was nearly four o’clock. He got on the bike and motored back up the hill to the bank.
It wasn’t until Attila got inside that he realized how drunk he was. He must
have been slurring his words, because when he asked the tellers for the money, they started laughing. Attila waved his pistol and yelled, but it didn’t help. He watched dumbly from the wrong side of the counter as two employees punched a lock on the safe. Finally he summoned enough force to launch himself up and over the divider, where he grabbed as much cash as he could from the teller drawers and lumbered back out the front door.
Thirty-one
The report of the Vecsés OTP robbery didn’t get to Keszthelyi until the next day. The perpetrator of the crime had gotten away with just 224,000 forints ($960), less than the price of the scooter he’d forgotten in the parking lot, which was found with the key in the ignition and the helmet on the seat. If the job was the work of the Whiskey Robber, he’d set a new all-time low for himself.
The next day the bank camera’s videotape was delivered to the Death Star, and as soon as Valter and Keszthelyi watched the film of the robber jumping over the counter, they knew it was Attila. They also knew that the last thing they needed was to make any public acknowledgment of the out-of-town hit, so the robbery went unreported by the media and George Magyar held on, for the time being, to the T-shirt that Éva had delivered to his office the previous day.
It was probably just as well for Magyar, whose weekly press conferences about the Whiskey Robber case were beginning to grate on the public. Not that he wasn’t a compelling showman. At his last event, he had sat next to a life-size cardboard cutout of Attila and spoken in the first person as if he himself were the Whiskey Robber, announcing the release of his autobiography, I, the Whiskey Robber, the book based on the material Attila had written during his time in the Gyorskocsi Street jail. Rewritten by Mai Nap’s Judit P. Gál, the mass-market paperback—part pulp-style confessional, part how-to robbery manual—sold seventeen thousand copies in its first week, breaking Hungarian sales records.
Keszthelyi, like Magyar, had also resorted to measures that, if they’d been performed in public, may have appeared no less absurd. He was so anxious, he sometimes deployed inexplicably large forces at the slightest suggestion of Attila’s presence. One night after a supposed Whiskey Robber sighting was phoned in, Keszthelyi sent a commando team in full riot gear through the windows of a farmhouse about 3:00 a.m. only to find a petrified elderly couple and their two grown children inside, one of whom bore a resemblance to Attila. Keszthelyi also had a pet project that seemed to have worse odds of catching Attila than Attila’s turning himself in. Aware of the robber’s affinity for exotic seaside locations, Keszthelyi had requested and received funding and personnel to open a fake travel agency in downtown Budapest catering to high-end clients. He had rented the office space and was finalizing plans for the advertising campaign. The Blue Dolphin Travel Agency would be a unique full-service operation—the only travel agency in town staffed exclusively by undercover police officers.
Meanwhile, some small but real breaks in the case were starting to develop. An informant, most likely the hooker Attila called to János’s apartment in the first week after his escape, had come forward to report that Attila had been staying with a János Kovács. János, who was no stranger to the Budapest police (he had a list of petty Planet of the Zorg–type offenses to his credit), was hauled in and questioned. After several interrogation rounds, he admitted having put up the Whiskey Robber for a few days but claimed not to know where the thief had gone after leaving his apartment. Keszthelyi didn’t believe him, and he placed János under surveillance.
Also, Károly “Karcsi” Antal was finally in police custody, having been arrested while trying to come over the Hungarian border from Romania on the Csíkszereda hockey team bus. Karcsi, too, claimed to have no information about Attila’s current whereabouts, but Keszthelyi wanted to see what he would say after sitting in Gyorskocsi for a few months.
INTERPOL was also making some progress. There had been no sightings of Attila in Csíkszereda, the agency reported back to Keszthelyi. But according to its sources, László Veres was indeed hiding in the small village of Fitód. INTERPOL had also found and interviewed Attila’s former girlfriend Betty, in her hometown in Székelyföld, who claimed she had not seen Attila since they broke up in 1998. (She said she’d moved back to Transylvania after her more recent boyfriend threatened that if she didn’t start coming home on time he would “sell” her.)
Lastly, Valter Fülöp had finally received the phone company records from Attila’s Villányi Street apartment and was tracing down every number that had been dialed from the apartment since a line had been installed there in the mid-nineties. They were slowly closing the circle on Attila. It was just a matter of time.
On October 6 Attila spent his thirty-second birthday alone in Domonkos’s apartment. Needless to say, it had been quite a year. Only ten months earlier, his name had been little known outside ice hockey circles of the Carpathian basin. Now, though he didn’t know it, he was being hailed around the world as a folk hero. He knew only his reputation inside Hungary, where he was a bestselling author, and the subject of a rap by Gangsta Zoli (“The Whiskey Robber Is the King”) that was in regular rotation on Hungarian radio. How’s that for gray nobody? But he didn’t feel much like celebrating. He was living like a caged animal, once again too afraid to consider leaving the confines of Domonkos’s flat because of what he perceived as a slight but discernible increase in the frequency of the statements from police sources that the Whiskey Robber was out of the country by now. Attila saw the scattered assertions as a delicate and deliberate ploy to draw him into the open.
He wasn’t going to fall for it. And yet he couldn’t keep living the way he was much longer. In order to quell his anxiety, he was drinking so much that his face was swollen. His stomach was constantly upset. His only wish on his birthday was that he’d live to see another. If he could survive, he would go back to selling Parker pens. Anything but this.
Within a few days he’d made a decision. It was going to have to be all or nothing. The odds wouldn’t be good, but he needed to go for one big score. It was time to place his bet and accept his fate, whatever it would be.
He settled on one bank, memorable for its distinctive sloped all-glass ceiling, that he’d cased and recorded in his now-destroyed encyclopedia. It was a huge institution, set in the shadow of a maudlin high-rise apartment building, on lli Street, one of the main arteries heading southeast out of town. It was about four minutes without traffic from the nearest police precinct station. Though Attila preferred banks with five or fewer employees, this one had approximately thirty and potentially as many customers—a clear 5 in his rating system. Plus the OTP had recently made a well-publicized investment of a billion forints ($4.3 million) in bank security systems. There would definitely be cameras, an armed guard, and a time-coded safe. But if locating a large supply of money was the only factor that mattered, it was a good choice. Attila figured there would be at least 40 million forints ($172,000) on hand, enough to enable him to set up a life far away that he could possibly even enjoy, and as a bonus, strike a final crushing blow to the police department.
He asked Domonkos to spot him some cash and to go buy him a new pair of dress shoes and a sports jacket. As usual, Attila would do the job as near to closing time as possible.
Three times the weather forecast an autumn rain and Attila began drinking early to steel himself. But each time the sky cleared by lunch-time and he aborted the plan. Finally one dreary October morning, he pushed a bullet clip into his Glock 9mm gun, packed a can of pepper spray to throw the dogs off his scent, and got dressed in the outfit Domonkos had bought him.
Unwilling to risk public transportation, he pulled his baseball hat down low and hailed a taxi. He’d drunk so much that on the ride over his head was spinning. When he got out of the car near the bank and tried to make it inside, he realized he also had a bigger problem. It was his new loafers. They were killing him. By the time he made it to the bank, their stiff backs were slicing into his ankles. He sat down in the waiting area to decide if he could
go through with it, but there was no way. He could barely walk. If he was going to have a chance to pull off this job, the one thing he had to be able to do was run fast and far. He got up and limped out.
It was a week before his blisters healed enough for him to function normally in shoes again. He chose another pair of shoes and Monday, October 18, as the day—rain, shine, or shoe trouble.
Again, Attila went by taxi, sloshed. The security camera captured him entering the bank at 5:50, wearing a plaid English cap, black shoes with a buckle, dark wool pants, a black sports jacket, and glasses. The change from the cool outside air to the temperature-controlled atmosphere of the bank made him nauseous. He took a number and sat down on a couch in the waiting area, sweating whiskey.
The interior of the building was huge, almost the size of a hockey rink. About fifteen customers were scattered around the premises, changing notes and depositing and withdrawing cash. After a few minutes Zsolt Kemecsei, a teller, came out from behind the counter with a key ring in his hand. He walked past Attila toward the front door, which was separated from the main area by a small hallway and shielded by a black glass partition from the inside of the bank. When Kemecsei reached the hallway, he felt a gun at his back and heard a voice say, “Don’t do anything stupid. Lock the door and then give me the key.”
Attila clutched Kemecsei close enough that the employee could smell the liquor on the Whiskey Robber’s breath. Attila took the key and put it in his jacket pocket. Still shielded by the black glass, Attila asked Kemecsei to walk with him back into the atrium and over to the haggard-looking guard. János Májor was completely surprised by what the well-dressed customer in front of him had to say. “Throw down your gun, or I’ll shoot,” Attila commanded, pointing his gun at Májor’s chest. Májor complied without a word.
Ballad of the Whiskey Robber Page 30