The thief had been in custody for a little over an hour when Mound of Asshead burst into the precinct house near the Danube River jogging path. So far, the cops who’d been questioning Gabi had succeeded only in getting him to ante up the name of a common rodent. “Patkány, patkány, patkány,” Gabi said like a broken record. Rat, rat, rat. He repeated the word for so long, you could almost count time by it, which, since there was no clock in sight, was precisely what Gabi was trying to do.
Normally, the undersize Mound wasn’t much use as an intimidator of anything but inanimate objects. But the Whiskey Robber case had shaken something deep in his potbelly. To him, it was the reason his best friend, Lajos, had been driven from the force. And thus it was the root cause of an even more painful development: the ascension of the most condescending member of the robbery squad, József Keszthelyi, to robbery chief, even though Mound had been the longtime deputy and had more years on the job.
Mound descended on the cell where Gabi was being held and asked the precinct cops to step out of his way. That was the moment at which two distinct versions of how Gabi came to cough up his own name, and then that of his accomplice, were born. One version, Mound’s, involves precision psychological pressure; the other, Gabi’s, entails a series of crushing body blows, which, since he was handcuffed, he was helpless to deflect.
Either way, just under three hours after his capture, Gabi provided the details necessary to enable Lajos Varjú’s successor, József Keszthelyi, to become the first member of the robbery department to meet the Whiskey Robber. Like Gabi, Attila had given himself up without a fight. But Keszthelyi wasn’t taking any chances. When word came in from Ártánd that Attila was in custody, Keszthelyi ordered the border guards not to transport him from the premises. He wanted Attila handcuffed and put in the holding pen in the border station’s basement. He was coming to pick up the robber himself.
When Keszthelyi pulled up to the border about 7:00 p.m., a television truck bearing the insignia of Hungary’s MTV broadcasting channel was already parked outside. Keszthelyi went inside, brushed past Kriminális reporter József Jónás, and bounded down the stairs to the station’s basement, where he found exactly what he hoped not to see in the holding pen: nothing. No Whiskey Robber, no guards, not even a note.
Keszthelyi scrambled back outside. One of the border guards pointed him toward a cornfield behind the building, where the outline of two men was barely discernible in the early-evening light.
Keszthelyi drew his Jericho pistol from his belt and began walking toward the figures, watching the steam from their breath waft into the January night. As he got closer, he could see they were both looking away in the direction of Romania. Then, without turning, one of the men called out to Keszthelyi. “Regards, Mayor,” the voice said. Keszthelyi stopped in his tracks as Attila looked back over his shoulder at the new robbery chief. It was then that Keszthelyi got his first look at the man the Budapest police had been chasing for just a week shy of six years. He was attached by a thick leash to a border guard, taking a leak in the field.
When Attila finished urinating, Keszthelyi wordlessly herded him into the back of his car, along with the evidence the border guards had collected from Attila’s purple Opel: a Browning, a Parabellum, and a Tokarev pistol, 18 million forints ($77,000), a bottle of whiskey, and a Bernese mountain dog. After giving a short statement to the Kriminális reporter, he cuffed Attila’s hands to a metal bar in the backseat and took off for the Death Star.
Back in Budapest, news of the Whiskey Robber’s capture had spread like syphilis, and reporters who had never covered hockey before were homing in on the UTE locker room like flies around an outhouse. After the radio reporter’s shrieks reached the bench at the end of the first period of the UTE-FTC showdown, the shaken UTE players gathered to discuss forfeiting the game. But they were ahead, 4–2, and without confirmation of the rumors about their teammates, they decided to continue. In the remaining two periods, UTE surrendered five unanswered goals and lost, 7–4. (They would also lose all twelve remaining games that season.) When the final horn sounded, the players tramped back to their smelly quarters in a stupor. Even Bubu, still a member of FTC, hypnotically followed his former UTE team-mates instead of going to the visitors’ changing room, where his clothes were hanging.
The players sat mutely at their lockers. The information about their teammates—which judging by the number of reporters stationed conspicuously around the room appeared to be true—was difficult to digest. Hungary hadn’t had such a universally well regarded figure as the Whiskey Robber since anyone could remember. The hats, the wigs, the headlines, the demoralized officials, all that stunning criminal work—had it been the Chicky Panther all that time? And what about Gabi? On the one hand, the squirt had become even flashier than Attila with his cars and fancy house, and it was no secret that he experimented with expensive drugs. But donning police uniforms and robbing banks? He’d grown up in housing built by the OTP.
Bubu was afraid, correctly, that Attila’s arrest meant he was already under suspicion of having been involved in the Whiskey Robber’s six-year spree. Zsolt Baróti, who’d just spent New Year’s with Attila, was sure the police had the wrong guys. No one with as much fame and money as the Whiskey Robber could possibly be as unhappy as Attila. Some of the other guys were stoked, though they weren’t about to admit it. The few who agreed to talk to the media expressed surprise.
“He didn’t look like a gangster,” Kercs
Árpád, an ex-captain of UTE who was at the stadium, told Mai Nap of Attila. “I’m shocked by the news, although I remember when he arrived to practice in an exquisite car, several people joked, ‘Look, the mafioso arrived.’ But I never thought he would rob banks.”
“He stood out as a hardworking man,” the diminutive UTE manager Gustáv Bóta told Magyar Hírlap of his Panther. “If Attila Ambrus needs anything in prison, he can count on me.”
On the opposite side of town, three robbery department detectives crashed through the door of the superintendent’s flat at Villányi Street 112. Only one item, found under the sink in the kitchen, was seized as evidence: a plastic bag stuffed with dozens of neatly clipped newspaper articles chronicling post office, travel agency, and bank robberies dating back to January 1993.
Lajos Varjú was behind his desk at the Blue Moon, trying to go home for the night if only his phone would stop ringing. First it was Mound, relaying the news that the Whiskey Robber and his accomplice had been caught. Then it was a reporter from Mai Nap looking for a reaction. “Aren’t you bitter that you weren’t present at the arrest?” the reporter asked the former robbery chief, with tabloid tact.
“To me, the police is in the past,” Lajos said, lying. “I’m happy for the success of my colleagues and I congratulate them.”
Click.
The elevator doors on the seventh floor of the Death Star opened just before midnight, spilling the contents everyone had been waiting hours to see and someone’s Bernese mountain dog.
Keszthelyi and Attila confidently walked each other down the hall, stone-faced, the way men do when pretending not to want an audience. Attila, hands cuffed in front of his waist, walked ahead of the robbery chief. What did Keszthelyi care what his arrestee did? As soon as they reached the end of the hall, the Whiskey Robber’s show was over.
Keszthelyi had already planned it out. On the ride back from the border, he hadn’t said one word to Attila, letting him boil in his own soup all the way to Budapest. Keszthelyi knew Mound had gotten only vague details related to seven or eight robberies out of George Orbán’s brother, but Keszthelyi wasn’t going to stop at that. Nor would he perform his interrogation in one of the closet-size one-way-mirrored rooms, where Gabi had been sweating until only an hour ago. Keszthelyi wanted everyone to watch him pick apart the Whiskey Robber. When he and Attila reached the open secretary’s station between his corner office and the conference room, the robbery chief directed Attila to sit down at the large triangular table as the detectives fanned into positions from which to observe.
Everything was set for Keszthelyi to begin when Attila committed yet another robbery. Before Keszthelyi could start, the Whiskey Robber turned his hazel eyes up to his captors and announced, “Gentleman, I have failed.” Then he asked for a map. If the moment had belonged to the robbery chief, it didn’t any longer. For the next sixteen hours, as Don bounded up and down the hallway, sniffing shoes, the police listened as Attila detailed all twenty-six of his robberies over the past six years as if he were delivering a keynote. Attila recounted in chronological order disguises, bank tellers, video cameras, escape routes, and the exact count of his bounties. Every couple of hours, Keszthelyi sent another member of the robbery department charging to the archive room to search for files that had been gathering dust for years. Not even the typist could keep up with Attila’s story. At 4:00 a.m. her hands cramped into bear claws and she had to be replaced.
Attila was still going the following morning when the Hungarian media gathered on the main floor of the Death Star in the large auditorium normally reserved for conferences. Keszthelyi, who had gone downstairs to listen, looked on as the new Budapest police chief, Antal Kökényesi, announced that the dangerous serial robber known as the Whiskey Robber had been captured. Yes, he was the UTE hockey goalie known as the Chicky Panther. Yes, he had been part of the Interior Ministry’s team since 1988. Yes, his accomplice was George Orbán’s kid. No, not the Goal King, the other one. The thief had indeed confessed to several of the robberies, Kökényesi reported, though he could not give a number yet since it seemed to be increasing by the hour. Asked how many heists the police had physical evidence to prove were committed by the Whiskey Robber, Kökényesi glanced over at Keszthelyi, then back at the reporters in front of him. “Eight,” he muttered.
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 Sz
cs. 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.