Twenty-nine

Buda Castle

Budapest

July 3, 1999

You are beginning your careers at an auspicious moment,” said Prime Minister Orbán, looking out at the graduates of Hungary’s Police Officer College seated before him. “The past year has brought a breakthrough in the fight against crime. We have made it clear that Hungary will be a peaceful, honest, and respectable country…. The police force today is managed by efficient and strong-handed leaders. And the government is fully behind the police.”

Gyorskocsi Street jail

Budapest

Seven days later

9:01 A.M.

Károly Benk stood in walk box number four for several seconds before he could believe what his heavy-lidded eyes and overtired brain were registering. He was sure that six minutes earlier he’d locked Attila Ambrus into this sunny twenty-six-by-sixteen-foot space and gone to the chair at the end of the courtyard to smoke a cigarette, as he always did. Then, thirty seconds ago, when a conspiratorial squawking began to emanate from the open-air boxes, he had walked back to peer through the doors’ round porthole-like windows.

Numbers one, two, and three were okay. But there was indeed an irregularity in number four. The inmate was gone. The Whiskey Robber was gone.

Károly’s reaction surprised even himself. Instead of hitting the alarm, he took off past his chair, into the jail, and down the hall toward the kitchen, yelling, “Lock up the knives!”

Attila had to be somewhere on the premises.

Károly grabbed two other guards, and the three of them burst into the parking lot in the jail’s inner courtyard. Attila couldn’t have exited through the walk-box door; it was still locked. The only other way he could have disappeared was by somehow scaling the thirteen-foot cement wall of the box. That would have put him on a thin path leading to a guard tower, which was empty today because of a shortage in staff. The only way down from there was through the building’s inner courtyard, which mostly served as the employees’ parking lot.

Károly and his men looked under the dozen or so cars. One of them dove into the garbage Dumpster. Nothing. They bounded up a small set of metal stairs that led to the door to the administration building. It was unlocked, as it never should have been.

They spread out through the hallways on every floor, but everything looked agonizingly unremarkable. As on any other Saturday morning, the long corridors were empty and still. The only sounds came from a few clanks of an odd typewriter and the giggle of a secretary making a personal call.

A few minutes later Károly and one of the other guards spilled out the main entrance, gasping in the morning air like a pair of desperate fugitives. Two joggers heading toward the Danube sneered at them. Then, from behind a city bus, the third guard came careening around the corner with a message suited for an urgent telegraph or Károly Benk’s gravestone: There was a rope! Dangling from the window! Of Blinky Béla’s office!

Wooden clubs drawn, Károly and his men raced back inside and up three flights of stairs to room 309. The door to Béla’s office was jammed shut. Károly kicked it in.

The office was empty. The computer and fax machine were on the floor. The seat cushion from the armchair was sticking up from the chair’s base. The green grating on the window had been pulled out of the wall, and a thin rope of pink, red, and blue bedsheets—the same ones Attila used in his cell—was affixed to the steel radiator and led out the open window. He was gone.

Károly had no choice but to call HQ. He picked up the phone on the desk, but there was no dial tone or, now that he looked, any cord attached to the unit. Like the wires from the fax machine and the computer, the phone cord had been reappropriated as the last several yards of the escape rope, the end of which dangled a mystifying seventeen feet above the sidewalk outside.

At 9:14 Károly made the unhappy call from an office down the hall.

The Death Star dispatcher’s first call was to Bérdi, who was preparing to leave for a weekend in the countryside with a group of friends to celebrate his having passed the Hungarian law bar exam. The next call went to the robbery chief Keszthelyi, who was also at home, eating breakfast and preparing for a summer break at Lake Balaton. Neither of the men believed the news at first or, when convinced of its validity, had any idea what to do. No one had ever escaped from the Gyorskocsi Street jail before. There was no procedure to follow.

Budapest police chief Antal Kökényesi was already on holiday, so technically his deputy Jakab Géza was in charge of the city. When Géza heard the news, he went straight to the Death Star and phoned national police chief Péter Orbán (no relation to the prime minister or the Whiskey Robber’s accomplice or the taxi driver who was briefly arrested after unwittingly carting Attila and Gabi to and from their last robbery). Neither Géza nor Orbán wanted to send the matter any further up the ladder. They knew that their boss, Interior Minister Sándor Pintér, was with the prime minister that weekend, preparing for the arrival on Monday of an FBI delegation from the United States. There was an international crime conference beginning in Budapest on Tuesday.

The Whiskey Robber problem needed to be disposed of quickly. Géza saw only one way to ensure that. It was going to be one hell of an inconvenience, but at 10:50 a.m., he issued an emergency decree sealing the capital, a measure no one could remember having been taken since 1956.

About that time, Bérdi was arriving at the Gyorskocsi Street jail to find the halls echoing with inmates’ cheers and chants. Fearing an uprising, he called Géza at the Death Star and asked for three commando units to be sent over on the double. At 11:54 a.m., as the muffled chop of low-flying police helicopters rumbled through the jail’s corridors, thirty-six special troopers in riot gear fanned out through the building, beginning a systematic search of each cell.

The city’s entire police force—more than two thousand cops—was called into action. They were divided into four groups and sent out to comb every block of the city. Roadblocks, manned by cops in bullet-proof vests, were set up at every bridge and all seven highways leading out of the city. Searches of the bus, subway, and train stations were made top priority. After witnesses reported seeing a motorboat take off from a nearby dock about the time of the escape, the Danube Water Police was also enlisted. Budapest’s Ferihegy International Airport was put on a high-security alert.

Bérdi believed that Attila was still inside the jail. The rope was too short to provide a safe landing on the street. It had to be a decoy. When the first search by the commando teams was finished, he ordered another, including checks of the closets, heating ducts, and the roof. “Again,” Bérdi whispered when they finished, sending them back for a third sweep.

In cell 312, where the Whiskey Robber had resided until a few hours ago, the troopers picked up two items of note just as the television crews arrived: a sixty-five-page typed autobiographical manuscript and a heavily thumbed copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, volumes one and two. Of even greater interest was what was missing from the cell: under Attila’s bed, behind a stinking clump of old bread crusts, was a hole in the wall two feet deep.

Attila’s cellmate István Szopkó, the check fraud specialist who had opted not to go out for the walk that morning, pleaded ignorance of Attila’s escape plans. He’d been transferred into the cell only a day earlier—when he arrived, he had mistaken Attila for the infamous Duna Bank embezzler—and he was too tired to go for the walk, he told the commando team. Of the morning, he said, “We got up around eight-thirty. They told us, ‘It’s a walk.’ He [Attila] was already dressed, had black jeans, a cream-colored short-sleeved T-shirt, and white athletic shoes. Before the walk, he shaved off his beard but left the mustache.”

All four of Attila’s former cellmates, who had been rotated in and out so as to limit Attila’s opportunity to form alliances, were also interviewed. None of them claimed to know anything of his plans or even about the bread-encrusted tunnel in their former cell. Tibor Benyó, who had been Attila’s cellmate until only two days earlier, remembered that Attila had recently told him, “In this world, it’s not worth it to be fair or sincere.” Gabi, who was being held on another floor, was about as helpful as usual: not at all.

About 2:00 p.m. the skies darkened and a heavy rain that would not stop for days descended. The police issued a national alert to the media and all law enforcement officers in Hungary that the fugitive Attila Ambrus should be considered armed and dangerous. Despite Attila’s cellmate’s description of what he was wearing, the communiqué stated that Attila was last seen wearing purple pants, a cream-colored shirt, and a full beard and mustache.

George Magyar also contacted various media outlets to let them know that his client would never be caught. “The only way he can be caught is if he dies,” Magyar told one reporter when pressed. “Defeat for him is not an option.” Indeed, for Magyar, victory was at hand; forint signs danced in his head.

Acting police chief Jakab Géza had never heard such proclamations come out of the mouth of a lawyer. Géza put Keszthelyi in charge of coordinating the search effort while he frantically attempted to acquaint himself with every aspect of the case. He had Bérdi fax Attila’s entire file, and his partially written autobiography, to the Death Star. When Géza learned how Attila had entered Hungary, he refined his previous search order, specifying that the transportation searches include the bottoms of every vehicle and train car. Hysterical from the time pressure, Géza called Bérdi so many times with questions that Bérdi eventually cracked, smashing his telephone into his desk until it splintered into pieces.

As darkness fell with no letup in the rain, the Danube River began overflowing onto the side streets, submerging cars and halting traffic. The troops who had been searching the city all day still had nothing, and inside the Death Star, hopes for a quick resolution to the crisis were fading. At 11:00 p.m. another national alert was transmitted to all checkpoints and news bureaus, reading, “Instead of bordeaux-colored pants, his pants were black. Instead of a cream-colored T-shirt with no pockets, he had a cream-colored shirt with two pockets; and instead of a beard, he was freshly shaven but wore a mustache.” There were still no photographs available; eight hundred copies of Attila’s mug shot were being slowly reproduced in the bowels of HQ.

Just before midnight Géza reluctantly ordered the city reopened. Bérdi, Keszthelyi, and most of the two thousand cops who had worked all day went home hoping to catch a few hours of sleep before the newspapers hit the stands. But the night would not end without at least one arrest. Károly Benk, finishing up what was now a forty-two-hour shift, retired to a cot in one of the jail cells he normally guarded. He had been taken into custody and charged with suspicion of aiding and abetting Attila’s escape.

When the FBI conference began in Budapest on Tuesday, the country was just beginning to dry out from the worst flooding in decades. The three-day intelligence meetings were to center on the progress of the historic joint Hungarian-American law enforcement team that had been formed the previous summer to fight organized crime and corruption in the region. Despite the hoopla surrounding the formation of the task force, however, the unit had not arrested anyone, and the man whom many in international law enforcement believed to be the most dangerous criminal in the world, Semion Mogilevich, was still living comfortably in Budapest, reportedly dealing, among other things, nuclear materials. Maybe no one back in America was concerned about the historic force’s ineptitude, but in Hungary it had fueled the already rampant skepticism about the credibility of both countries’ governments. After all, how else to explain why the White House would welcome Sándor Pintér, the least-trusted government official in Hungary, to speak at an anti-corruption conference?

Yet while American representatives to the Budapest congress were prepared to address concerns about the joint force’s efficacy, they were not prepared for the news that greeted them upon arriving in the soggy city. Local journalists barely had time or space to play up the theft that morning of Prime Minister Orbán’s car, the second vehicle stolen from his office in only a few months. The papers and airwaves were instead overflowing with coverage of the Transylvanian hockey goalie who had departed from the city jail on a bedsheet, the same character some FBI agents recognized as the Lone Wolf. According to public opinion polls, between 80 and 90 percent of Hungary was rooting for the Whiskey Robber to outrun the authorities. On the city’s streets, vendors were doing a brisk business selling T-shirts and coffee mugs proclaiming, I THE WHISKEY ROBBER! and GO WHISKEY ROBBER! “Would you have climbed down from the window on a shoelace?” inquired an unscientific poll of Hungarians in Mai Nap. “I wouldn’t have done that, because I would have been so scared,” answered one man, “but this guy is so skilled, I can imagine him doing anything.” Officially, Hungarian authorities had no comment on the matter; they had yet to figure out what in hell they would want to add to the dialogue.

On Wednesday Blikk ran a double-page story in which Dr. Hegeds Magdolna, a plastic surgeon, offered suggestions as to how Attila could better his chances of remaining at large. (She recommended a chin reconstruction—“It’s too wide, I’d make it a bit more narrow”—for 400,000 forints [$1,700] but offered a full array of procedures and prices.) HVG, Hungary’s largest newsweekly, wrote breathlessly of Attila’s escape, dubbing him the “Hungarian Butch Cassidy.”

The only member of the media not participating in the furor was one of the men who helped create it, Kriminális host László Juszt. After Juszt had reported one month earlier that Prime Minister Orbán’s infamous “Hungarian Watergate” spy charges had been declared baseless by a parliamentary committee investigation, Juszt was arrested and charged with “revealing state secrets.” The prime minister explained that the parliamentary committee’s findings (of nothing) had been classified material and, thus, Juszt had jeopardized the country’s safety with his story. Juszt was also fired from the supposedly independent Hungarian Television.

On Wednesday afternoon the Hungarian police finally made a statement regarding the Whiskey Robber case. An hour after George Magyar held a televised news conference announcing that he’d copyrighted, in Hungarian and English, the name Whiskey Robber (which was true) and struck a “Hollywood movie deal” with an unnamed producer for film rights to his client’s story (which wasn’t), police spokesman Dézsi Mihály emerged from his Death Star office to brief reporters. “This is human stupidity,” Mihály said. “It was twenty-seven counts of armed robbery. Full stop.”

Once again, robbery chief József Keszthelyi found himself in charge of finding the man he’d just been promoted to colonel for catching. Things were, of course, markedly different this time, and not just because Keszthelyi knew who he was looking for. In the six months since he’d caught Attila, Keszthelyi had become, literally, the poster boy for Hungary’s new and improved police force. To counter flagging public confidence in his government, Prime Minister Orbán had launched what was known as the “public image” campaign. As part of the program, the police introduced a new slogan—“Let’s Serve Together”—which was emblazoned on publicity materials distributed across the country. Above the block-lettered banner, the posters and pamphlets featured a large color photograph of none other than the smiling blue-eyed robbery chief astride a police motorcycle, flanked by two other bike-riding cops. Given the public reaction to the Whiskey Robber’s escape, it was plain that a lengthy manhunt threatened to undo any progress the campaign might have made. For Keszthelyi, it also had the potential to destroy his promising young career. Not finding Attila Ambrus wasn’t an option.

Keszthelyi replaced his cell phone with a new one that allowed him to program in different rings for different numbers, enabling him to ignore calls from the media. He rarely went home, most of the time curling up for a few hours of sleep on the green velvet couch in his office that had once billeted Lajos. The top brass at the police gave Keszthelyi the authority to choose his own special seven-member squad to work exclusively on the case. Among those Keszthelyi chose for his team were two of Bérdi’s investigators, including Valter Fülöp, who relocated their offices from the Gyorskocsi Street jail to the Death Star. Keszthelyi also picked up the police department’s top undercover investigations expert, László Kozák. Noticeably missing from the search team was Mound, who had quit the police force a week before Attila’s escape to join Lajos at Blue Moon, and Dance Instructor, who had been transferred into an administrative post.

Each morning Keszthelyi went to the bathroom and mussed some water around in his crew cut, then headed into the seventh-floor conference room at 7:00 a.m. to meet with his group around a large U-shaped conference table. Copies of Attila’s partially written autobiography lay marked up on the table. Maps of the city were tacked to the wall. The file cabinets in the corner were stuffed full with more than ten thousand pages from the case.

There was no consensus in law enforcement circles as to whether Keszthelyi would succeed. Many, including Lajos Varjú (whose speculation frequently appeared in the papers), believed the Whiskey Robber was already long gone into the Transylvanian mountains.

But Keszthelyi disagreed. He was sure Attila was laying low in the city somewhere, trying to figure out how to score enough money to get somewhere far away where he could live under a different identity. He didn’t buy the rumors that Attila had left a hidden stash somewhere that he’d by now grabbed and taken off with. Nonetheless, he wasn’t leaving any possibility unexamined. Keszthelyi sent a special request to Romanian authorities, asking for their help in apprehending Attila. (“Ambrus Attila is an especially dangerous criminal,” the letter stated. “He may be armed. We are requesting you make this your top priority.”) He also called in INTERPOL, specifically to track several of Attila’s hockey teammates, including Jen “Bubu” Salamon and Zsolt Baróti, whom Keszthelyi’s men were not able to locate in Budapest. The names of Károly “Karcsi” Antal and Lázsló Veres, Attila’s first two accomplices who had never been apprehended, were also forwarded to INTERPOL.

On street corners and subways around Budapest, Keszthelyi’s investigative team put up menu-size wanted signs, using a menacing picture of Attila from his initial arrest, wearing a black leather jacket and looking straight at the camera. And in case Attila had heeded Blikk’s advice and gone in for plastic surgery, doctored photos of him were also made and sent to all of the country’s police precincts and the media.

As for undercover surveillance, Keszthelyi’s team targeted several locations, including hotels, high-class brothels, casinos, and “places visited by Romanians”—bars, low-class brothels, train station corners, and Transylvanian restaurants. The robbery chief didn’t expect Attila to be stupid enough to reach out to any of his previous contacts, but just in case, he had Éva’s house in Érd surrounded, as well as the home of Zsuzsa Csala, the actress who had famously offered to adopt Don after Attila’s arrest. Keszthelyi also had a unit watch Lajos Varjú, as well as Don the dog, who was living in the suburbs with a relative of Attila’s grocery clerk friend, Zsuzsa. Two hundred fourteen people’s phones were tapped, fourteen of whom (including Éva and the actress Csala) were followed around the clock by four officers, two at a time in twelve-hour shifts.

But as the police soon began to realize, all the official manpower in the world might not make a difference. As Keszthelyi’s men circulated around town, they found that virtually no one they questioned was willing to help them catch the Whiskey Robber. Many Hungarians even appeared to relish the opportunity to assist in the authorities’ demoralization. From law-abiding citizens to career stool pigeons, people told Keszthelyi’s men that even if they saw Attila, they would never admit it. The case had become a referendum on the government.

On July 22 Interior Minister Sándor Pintér made a rare appearance before the media, appealing to their sense of moral responsibility. The media printed his warning verbatim. “All I would ask of you is that you ask the people who were the victims of these robberies about this,” Pintér said. “Ask the people he threatened with his gun, the people who were present when he fired bullets into the walls, shooting right past their ears, the people whose money he took. He stole over 130 million forints [$560,000]. Ask them how much of a hero they reckon him to be.”

Needless to say, Pintér’s voice did not carry much weight as a defender of the people.

THE HERO OF OUR TIME, THE BANK ROBBER, read the headline on the editorial page of Magyar Hírlap on July 29.

In a time bereft of morality, can anyone regard the deeds of the Whiskey Robber as a crime? And if so, what about the everyday “business” of the so-called elite…. [People] understand that they are locked out of the privileged class, which can do anything without punishment. Attila Ambrus had the courage to make an attack against this unjust system. He didn’t rob a bank. He just performed a peculiar redistribution of wealth, which differs from that of the elites only in its method.

That afternoon Keszthelyi recalled all of his men from the field for a special meeting.

“We need to rethink our approach to the investigation,” he told them. They needed to stop relying on the public’s help to catch the Whiskey Robber, he said, and start becoming proactive. The robber’s success had always come because of his ability to think like the police. Now they had to think like him. After nearly seven years on the case, Keszthelyi was confident he could help them do that.

“There are only two places Attila knows well,” Keszthelyi told his team. “Transylvania and Budapest. And there aren’t any banks in the mountains of Transylvania. Eventually, he’s going to turn up where the money is.” (Just as good old Willie Sutton said.)

Keszthelyi wanted his group to come up with a list of potential financial targets where they could set up shop and wait for the robber to come to them. If Attila was in Hungary, he obviously knew every cop in the country was after him. And he was a careful criminal. Keszthelyi didn’t believe Attila would risk venturing out to scope out a location before robbing it. Since he knew Attila didn’t like surprises, Keszthelyi was betting that he would show up someplace he’d already robbed. Valter, who’d spent more time interviewing Attila than anyone, agreed.

Over the next hour the group sifted through the case files and narrowed Attila’s past hit list down to four likely targets, easily eliminating the post office and travel agencies where he couldn’t score enough loot to make it worth the risk.

One of the four remaining targets was the Frankel Leó Street OTP, the last place Attila and Gabi had robbed before their arrest in January. But Valter felt that Attila was too superstitious to go back to the spot where his streak had ended.

“What about Heltai?” one of the investigators suggested. But it was deemed unlikely for similar reasons. It was where the shoot-out had taken place. Unlucky.

That left the post office next to the Gellért Hotel, where Attila had famously brought the bouquet of roses for the tellers and absconded with nearly 10 million forints ($65,000), and the Grassalkovich Street OTP, in the industrial southern outskirts of town, which he’d already robbed three times.

One of the investigators had recently been to the Gellért and thought he saw scaffolding in front of the nearby post office. They phoned the post office switchboard and were told that, indeed, the branch was closed for renovations. That left only Grassalkovich.

Just then Keszthelyi’s mobile phone began ringing—sounding the jingle that indicated it was the emergency dispatcher, who was on strict orders to phone him immediately if any information came in.

“Igen?” Keszthelyi said. Yes?“Robbery in progress,” he was told. “Grassalkovich Street OTP.”