Attila entered the bank in a blue and white canvas baseball hat, sunglasses, and a windbreaker, shouting, “You know who I am, I have nothing to lose!” The guard had recognized him even before he got inside, and tried to lock the door, but Attila was too fast and too strong. Most of the tellers had been on duty during at least two of Attila’s previous three robberies at that branch and knew the drill. They got down in their regular positions against the wall while Attila went to work.
Somewhere around the three-minute mark, the sound of sirens became audible along with another, more alarming noise—the low, rhythmic patter of helicopter blades. Attila stood up from his crouch in front of the time-lock safe and, with only the teller-drawer money in his bag, broke for the door in a dead run, feet flying, arms flailing. Across the street a postal worker saw a man racing from the building and, hearing the sirens and knowing the bank’s reputation as a Whiskey Robber feeding trough, jumped on his motorcycle to give chase.
As two helicopters wafted over the city’s southern horizon behind him, Attila turned left down one of the small streets leading toward the Danube and disappeared into a cluster of grass and trees behind a row of dilapidated wooden farmhouses. He hurdled some sagging wire fences and arrived several minutes later at a dirt road, beyond which stood a tall row of reeds at the marshy bank of the river.
The sound of the helicopter blades was starting to drown out the sirens. Attila looked up. The choppers were circling only a few blocks away.
He squatted in the grass, tied the plastic money bag as tightly as he could, and began wading into the mucky river. The current wasn’t bad, but his clothes were so heavy with water that once his feet could no longer touch bottom, he became afraid he might drown. There was splashing in the reeds along the bank, but from where he was, Attila couldn’t see the postal worker wading into the water after him. Holding the bag on the surface of the water, Attila took a deep breath and dipped his head under, kicking and stroking with his free hand.
When he hit the pavement outside the jail nineteen days earlier, it wasn’t as if Attila hadn’t considered swearing off crime entirely. If there was any upside to throwing yourself out a fourth-floor window on a short rope, it was that it likely followed a pledge of self-improvement. Attila had managed to land on his feet, but he severely twisted both his ankles, and the escape rope had torn up both his palms.
Needless to say, the death rope hadn’t been his top getaway choice. Attila had been working on ideas on how to get out for nearly two months before he read the attempted murder counts against him. Once, he offered to Bérdi that he could help the police do a re-enactment of the Heltai Square shooting, during which he hoped to make a run for it. When the request was denied, he considered claiming that he could lead Bérdi to a pot of hidden money somewhere in the woods. But it seemed too obvious, and if it didn’t work, he’d be stuck with a (false) admission that he had a cash stash.
Then Attila had his friend Zsuzsa bring him a screwdriver during one of her visits, which he used to begin tunneling through the plaster wall of his cell. But after chipping away for a few weeks and getting only an arm’s length in, he saw that plan wasn’t going to lead anywhere further than solitary confinement.
The only other possibility he could think of was the administration building window escape. He began stocking up on bedsheets and even asked Éva and Zsuzsa to bring him extra running shoes so he could use the laces. He’d carefully kept track of the placement of the few Khrushchev-era cameras in the corridors and walk boxes, and during his trips to the administration building, he had practically memorized its blueprint. He’d also noted that on summer weekends, there were far fewer guards around. If he could just make it over the walk-box wall without being seen, he figured he would make it—that is, as long as he could go out a window on the second floor.
Unfortunately, when he got into the administration building that morning, he’d heard voices on both the second and third floors, and with no time to waste, he headed instead for Blinky Béla’s office on the fourth floor, where, in preparation for just this scenario, he’d stashed an extra line of bedsheets under the armchair’s seat cushion one day while pretending to look at his file.
The sheet and rope combo wouldn’t reach the ground, so he ripped off the cords from the phone, fax, and computer and added them to his line. It still wasn’t long enough, but by the time he stepped out onto the window ledge, he was going down regardless of his uncertainty about the condition he would be in upon landing. Not even the horrified look on the face of the old woman on the sidewalk outside the Chang An Chinese restaurant directly across the street was going to stop him. At least the rope didn’t break. Once he reached the end, it was too painful to hold on and he let go, dropping to the concrete with a thud and a groan. It took a few seconds to swallow the shooting pain in his legs. Then the adrenaline took over. He began to run as best he could on two twisted ankles toward the Danube, where his first sight across the river was Parliament, spread out on the bank like a big, proud turd. Once at the jogging path, he turned north and continued past the same spot where Gabi’s fear of jumping six months earlier had led to their arrests.
When he reached the Margit Bridge, about half a mile from the jail, the mustard yellow 4/6 tram was screeching to its last stop in Buda. He hopped on and rode over the bridge to the Pest side, where he got out at the first stop, a small square with a fresh flower stand, and ducked into a nearby pub. The liquid-breakfast Saturday crowd was small. “Two beers,” Attila said to the bartender, but she recognized him anyway. “Aren’t you the Whiskey Robber?” she asked. He laughed. “I always get that,” he said. He slugged back the drinks and paid with some of the 25,000 forints ($110) he’d borrowed from Zsuzsa during her visit the previous afternoon. Then he went into the pub’s bathroom, where he stuffed his cream-colored long-sleeve shirt and black jeans in the bottom of the trash and pulled out the razor he’d brought from his cell. A few minutes later he walked out of the bar, clean-shaven and wearing shorts and a dark T-shirt, on his way to make a phone call to János Kovács, a man he’d never met before.
János was a contact Attila had been given by one of his cellmates at the jail. He was a real “musician,” Attila had been told, someone who worked on his own and knew the right notes to play for any occasion. Attila didn’t tell János who he was on the phone, only that he needed to see him right away.
They met at the market hall in the XV District, a sprawling several-story food and furniture bazaar. Attila told János he’d be in a red baseball hat, which Attila bought at one of the booths and pulled low over his head. When Attila’s searching pupils met with the bulging eyes of the thin balding man approaching him, Attila was pretty sure he’d found his maestro. “János,” the man said, reaching out his hand. A Viszkis, Attila said unnecessarily. I’m the Whiskey guy.
Attila told János he needed a place for a little while and offered to pay as soon as he had money. But János said he didn’t want Attila’s money. He put the Whiskey Robber up in his third-floor apartment downtown and went to stay with his brother-in-law. He said he’d check in on Attila in a few days.
Once safely ensconced in János’s flat, the first thing Attila did was to shave his head, which gave him the nerve to step outside a few times for food and supplies. But soon the increased police presence on the street began to scare him. He debated going to a brothel but, on his fifth day in János’s pad, he ordered a call girl to the apartment. Despite his shaved head, she not only recognized him instantly but started screaming about her brother, a cop. She clearly wasn’t one of Attila’s fans. Attila freaked. He grabbed the woman and told her that if she said anything to her brother, he would have his associates kill her. Then he pushed her out the door, went down to a pay phone, and called János. He had to get out of there quickly, he told him. But he had no idea where to go.
János knew exactly what to do. He called his friend Domonkos, a Székely from Székelyudvarhely, or Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romanian, a Transylvanian town just twenty-five miles west of Csíkszereda. As János correctly assumed, Attila’s support among Transylvanians was nearly unanimous. In Csíkszereda, Whiskey Robber T-shirts were all over the city. big city cowboy was the headline in Hargita Népe, the main local newspaper. The biggest Hungarian language daily in the country, Magyar Szó, based in Bucharest, wrote, “Attila wanted to taste the kind of life which for us is unattainable,” and compared him with Australian folk hero Ned Kelley. There was no way Domonkos would refuse to help the most famous living Székely.
Domonkos, a thirty-five-year-old unemployed plumber working part-time at a fruit market, had recently split up with his wife. And for reasons he was in therapy to explore, he preferred sleeping in his metallic green Honda at gas stations than in his studio apartment in northeast Budapest. Attila could have the place.
Domonkos wouldn’t accept any compensation from Attila, either, and he definitely did not want to know any of Attila’s plans. It was a deal. Attila had one small request: gauze and Neosporin for his palms, which were still so deeply scarred from the escape rope that he couldn’t make a fist. That was no trouble. Domonkos also agreed to come by the flat twice a week to restock Attila with food, whiskey, and all of the newspapers. So that Attila would know it was Domonkos at the door, they decided that before entering, Domonkos would knock twice quickly, then pause and knock again. Attila was not to leave the apartment.
Attila spent the following days crawling around the parquet floor, afraid to raise his head above the level of the windowpane. The apartment was on a busy intersection, above a 24-hour food mart. Often he jolted awake at the sound of a car horn.
Attila knew that if he wanted to make it out of Hungary and survive in an unfamiliar place without being discovered, he needed enough money for fake papers and the start-up costs of a new life. He estimated it would take between 20 and 25 million forints ($85,000–$110,000) to get somewhere safe like Brazil, where his hero Ronnie Biggs of England’s Great Train Robbery was living peaceably without fear of extradition.
And thus the visit to Grassalkovich Street, where—to his surprise and dismay—the staff had moved the safe since his last visit. When he heard the helicopters, he’d only just found the main repository for the bank’s cash. After running to the river, he swam through the Danube to Molnár Island, the piece of residential land in the middle of that section of the river. He pulled himself out on the Molnár Island bank, stripped off his clothes, and was standing naked with them in his hand when an old man chased him away, hollering about trespassing. The plastic bag Attila was carrying held only 1.5 million forints ($6,500). Nowhere near enough.
Later that day, when Domonkos came into his apartment with a bag of groceries in his large arms, he saw wet clothing strewn around the room and Attila sitting on the floor in a towel. On television was live coverage of the search for the Whiskey Robber, who had just made a dramatic return to robbery by pulling off his fourth job at the OTP Bank on Grassalkovich Street. There were conflicting reports as to how many policemen the robber had outswum through the Danube during his getaway. According to George Magyar, it was three hundred; according to the police, none.
Domonkos had known Attila for only twelve days, but the two of them had already developed their own shorthand. “Where have you been?” Domonkos inquired of his roommate.
“Yes,” said Attila.
The robbery at Grassalkovich Street was a disaster for Keszthelyi in virtually every way but one—at least he now knew that Attila was still in Budapest. And since the Transylvanian had gotten so little money from the job, Keszthelyi was sure Attila would be a city resident for at least a little while longer.
Keszthelyi was sure he would get another chance to catch Attila but for the time being he was the one who felt caught, presiding over a public relations disaster of capitalist proportions. THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE HUNGARIAN CRIME SQUADS COULD NOT BE LOWER, read a headline in Népszabadság. And it wasn’t just the Hungarian media covering the story anymore. The latest installment of the Whiskey Robber saga had awakened the international media, who appeared delighted to find that Hungary had finally produced something they could understand and admire: a folk hero. hungary’s robin hood was the headline in the Christian Science Monitor. whiskey robber wanted by police and pr people becomes a hungarian folk hero, touted London’s Independent. “Despite the fact that authorities are emphasizing the danger he poses, [Attila’s] popularity among the people continues to rise,” wrote France’s Le Figaro. Even the world’s largest sports magazine, U.S.-based Sports Illustrated, celebrated Attila as “one of the best goalies in his country’s top pro league.” Attila was already becoming part myth. It was a long way from the horse paddock.
Keszthelyi was approved to put full-time surveillance at ten banks around the city. But the real shift in police tactics was behind the scenes. With the help of the police public relations department, Keszthelyi and Géza launched an effort to destroy Attila’s public support. At one press conference Géza refuted Attila’s reputation as a man of modest upbringing, exclaiming, “Ambrus had more possibilities than the average citizen. He could have chosen legal ways.” Some articles, based on carefully leaked information from the police, also portrayed the hidden side of Attila to be that of a coarse, violent alcoholic who tried to kill two police officers. The police also successfully spread the not wholly untrue story that Attila had Don with him on the day of his arrest not because of his love for the dog but because he’d needed to go home for his passport and, while there, also grabbed the canine.
The most creative smear, however, came directly from Keszthelyi, who in interviews normally expressed himself in Terminator-style statements such as “I am the cop; he’s the thief. I will catch him.” But tucked behind a keyboard, Keszthelyi loosened up, penning an entirely fabricated article for the police newsmagazine, Zsaru, which ran under the headline is the whiskey robber attracted to boys? The two-page article, which claimed to be written “by our colleagues,” cited several anonymous people saying that Attila was gay. As soon as it hit the newsstands in early August, László Garamvölgyi, the national police spokesman, made the Hungarian radio and television talk-show rounds to break some hearts about the sexy bandit.
One morning in August, Attila and Domonkos were sitting on the floor of Domonkos’s apartment watching Napkelte (Sunrise), the Hungarian version of the Today show, when Garamvölgyi came on the set and began to talk about Attila’s homosexuality. Upon hearing the charge for the first time, Attila jumped up from the floor and bolted for the front door with the intention of going straight to the Death Star to do some damage. Fortunately, before he could get the door open, Domonkos tackled him from behind. Domonkos knew how hotheaded Székelys could be, and he wasn’t going to let their new Sándor Rózsa go down over something like this.
When Attila calmed down, he was no longer as intent upon getting out of the country so quickly. Just as Keszthelyi thrived on putting criminals away, Attila thrived on avoiding getting put away. And the latest emasculating smear amounted to real fightin’ words. The police had just upped the ante and Attila was going to see their bet and raise it. Over the past month, as the Hungarian media regularly compared Attila with Sándor Rózsa, who had stood for the rights of the common man in his series of maverick robberies and attacks against the ruling Hapsburgs, it had been getting harder for Attila not to think of his fight as something bigger than just a bid for his own freedom. That the police had now resorted to spreading lies about him to win back public opinion gave Attila renewed purpose. Lest he forget, this was about the truth. He wasn’t a murderer and he wasn’t a man of privilege and he wasn’t gay and he wasn’t going to stop until he exposed the government and its minions for the fraudulent malefactors they were.
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.