The village of Sátoraljaújhely is three and a half hours northeast of Budapest by train, on Hungary’s border with Slovakia and Ukraine. It sits on a small plain in a quiet, hilly region of the country, next to Tokaj, where the famous Hungarian sweet wines are produced. From the colorful narrow streets and flowery storefronts, it appears pleasant, even placid. But the view from inside the hulking yellow former underwear factory, beside a barbershop and an Italian restaurant on Main Street, is decidedly different. In a letter he wrote to Éva soon after arriving at Hungary’s highest-security prison, Attila described his new home as being “at the end of the earth, where even the birds don’t fly.”
For the first year and a half of his incarceration in Sátoraljaújhely, Attila was kept in a cell with four heavy smokers and, because he was considered a flight risk, was not allowed out of the cell unless the rest of the prison population was locked down. While most of the other inmates had work privileges, Attila did not. Isolated inside his smoke-filled, cement-floored living quarters, he tried to block out his surroundings by reading history books delivered from the prison library and teaching himself English, only to give up in frustration over the fact that he had no one to practice with. “I don’t mean it as a claim,” he said, “but the people here aren’t exactly graduates of the Hungarian Science Academy.”
He was allowed only one five-minute phone call a week and one hour-long visit a month—which became a rotation of Éva, Zsuzsa, the figure skater Virág, and his newest friend, Domonkos, who was released from custody after the final court hearing because he had already served more than his ten-month sentence. The prison commander had extended the Hungarian media ban on Attila, and in what was viewed both in the prison and around the country as an audacious act of defiance, Attila filed a lawsuit against the government for violating his rights to free expression. In the fall of 2001 a Hungarian court ruled in Attila’s favor, not only ending the ban but also ordering the prison commander to apologize to Attila.
The legal victory provided Attila some vindication and enabled him to do a string of new getting-to-know-you interviews, during one of which he proclaimed that he was “a criminal in every bone of my body.” But Attila’s legal win also led to a backlash. The guards regularly short-changed his visiting time, and Attila complained that they also began tampering with his meal schedule and exercise and shower privileges. He became so antagonistic toward his captors that he couldn’t even make it down a hallway without challenging someone—once buttonholing the prison’s food deliveryman to complain that the skin on the salami was too thin to remain fresh in the room-temperature refrigerators. In 2001, Attila was informed that his father had died of cancer. Deadened to the world, Attila felt “nothing.” Soon thereafter, during a visit from Domonkos, Attila gave instructions about the small funeral he wanted, implying that he intended to kill himself. Éva was afraid she’d been right: Attila wasn’t going to make it out of prison alive.
But Attila’s original robbery case had been taken up by the Hungarian Supreme Court, and he decided to wait to make any decision about his future until he got the new ruling. In Hungary both the prosecution and the defense have the right to challenge a lower court verdict, and in this case both did. Attila’s lawyer, George Magyar, argued that his client’s sentence was too long for someone found guilty of nonviolent robbery, a case Attila would make cogently during one interview, saying the fact that most murderers received lesser sentences than his showed that in Hungary, “human life is worth less than money.” On the other hand, the prosecutor in Attila’s case appealed to the Supreme Court on the grounds that despite the earlier finding to the contrary, the evidence against Attila was sufficient to prove attempted murder, and thus, Attila’s fifteen-year sentence was too light.
The case languished for more than a year until finally, in September 2002, Attila was driven to Budapest in an armored car to be present for what would be the final court hearing in his almost-decade-old saga. Before leaving the prison, Attila rejected suggestions from observers that he shave his sinister-looking beard to make a better impression on the judge, saying, “I’m tired of being a showman.”
After brief arguments by Magyar, the prosecutor, and, of course, Attila, the chief justice read the ruling on behalf of the three-judge panel. Once again the attempted murder charges were dismissed as inconclusive, leaving as the only substantive charges against Attila the ones to which he had pleaded guilty in the first place. The Supreme Court, however, ordered that Attila’s sentence not be reduced but extended by two years, to seventeen. “He is not Robin Hood,” the ruling explained. Attila would have to pay for his popularity.
The circus was now officially over. Attila was moved to a new higher-security cell (shared by one other prisoner) and given thick gray wool pants and a blue-and-gray-patterned long-sleeve shirt—the prison garb that he had not been required to wear while his case was still proceeding through the legal system. Éva, Zsuzsa, and Domonkos agonized that they would soon receive a call informing them that Attila had taken his life. But instead, as the months passed, Attila seemed more and more at peace with himself, an evolution that happened perhaps not coincidentally at the same time as his reconnection to his mother. In the summer of 2003 Klára Ambrus, née Csibi, traveled nearly a day by train from Transylvania to see Attila for the first time in more than twenty years. She spent most of their glass-partitioned reunion in tears but managed to get across what she’d come to say: it was her fault that Attila was sitting behind bars.
Attila told his mother he didn’t blame her for the course his life had taken, but he was glad she came. He’d never known until then that the reason she had left the family was not something he’d done but that his father had beaten her, too.
Since then, Attila has been consumed with using his idle time to educate himself properly. He spends much of his days reading, though he complains that the prison library is so thin that he’s read his copy of I, Claudius four times. He has also begun taking basic mathematics, science, and history classes in order to get a high school degree. On a recent history exam in which he received the equivalent of an A-, he appealed, and was granted, a perfect score after pointing out an error in the test. He hopes—even though it is unprecedented for a prisoner in Hungary—to later be allowed to apply to a Hungarian university as a correspondence student.
When he’s not studying or doing his exercises in the prison courtyard—where he’s calculated that 104 laps around the square equals 3.1 miles—he is obsessed with following the news of the world. He has subscriptions to six publications, ranging from daily newspapers to the Hungarian edition of Playboy, and can eloquently hold forth on topics from Yasir Arafat’s formative years to the disgrace of the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. When the hall warden allows television privileges, Attila practices his English by watching CNN on a fourteen-inch color set mounted in the corner of his cell.
What Attila sees on the screen is a far different world from the one in which he came to prominence. Once a fledgling democracy, Hungary is now a full member of NATO and the European Union. Corruption is still rampant, but violent street crime has abated and the economy, though tepid, is relatively stable. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy that Hungary had tried so hard to emulate deflated like a balloon in the spring of 2000. And the attacks of September 11, 2001, brought an emphatic end to the twelve-year period when the world order was defined by the fall of communism.
The reverberations within Hungary have been obvious. The country’s national elections in the spring of 2002 were arguably the most contentious in its history, becoming in many ways a referendum on the tumultuous postcommunist era. At the geographic center of a unified new Europe, Hungarians faced a choice between the government of the incumbent prime minister Viktor Orbán, of the Alliance of Young Democrats, and that of a former communist and secret intelligence agent, Péter Medgyessy, who had become the leader of the left-leaning Socialist Party. The Orbán government tried to frame the election as being about patriotism, a case made clumsily a few weeks before the election by one of Orbán’s top party deputies, who declared, “Whoever is not for us should get a rope, a hammer, and a nail and hang themselves.”
Among those who cast their ballots on election day was Attila Ambrus, who still had the right of suffrage because his case had not yet been finalized by the Supreme Court. Attila had never voted before in his life, and his heavily guarded journey to the Sátoraljaújhely voting station at the town hall was covered by a herd of photographers and camera crews. After deliberating for weeks, he decided to pull the lever for the Socialists, whom he still calls “the commies”—those former representatives of the political system he had spent the first twenty years of his life running from. Indeed, they won an unexpected victory over the Young Democrats.
More than a decade after he first began making news by stealing 548,000 forints ($5,900) from his neighborhood post office, there is rarely a week that goes by in which Attila does not appear on television or in the newspapers. When a bank in the town of Mor was robbed after a bloody gun battle that left eight dead, Attila was interviewed by several Hungarian news outlets as an expert crime analyst. Sometimes, even Don the dog makes the front pages of the tabloids, as he did recently when an anonymous tip led police to dig up the yard in which he is living, to search vainly for a buried stash of loot.
Though popular opinion in Hungary is now divided as to whether Attila is a positive or negative figure, the overwhelming majority of lower- and middle-class Hungarians commonly refer to him as the “Sándor Rózsa of our days” and “the modern Robin Hood.” In Transylvania his image remains almost uniformly heroic.
But regardless of his legacy, it is Attila’s past that remains so stunningly emblematic of the world in which he lived. He is a living relic of a bygone era, trapped inside the postcommunist snow globe he penetrated when he rode into Hungary beneath a train in 1988, just before the whole scene was shaken up. It is all but certain that he could not have carried out his seven-year, twenty-nine-robbery streak the way that he did—nor become the sensation that he did—at any other time, or possibly any other place in history. Hungary’s police force today may not be the world’s strongest, but it employs more than double the number of officers it did in 1993, who have access to contemporary vehicles, carry working weapons, and are linked to a central crime computer system. (They also remain closely allied with the United States; in August 2003 Hungary agreed to the U.S. request to become a primary training center for the new Iraqi police force.) And like the American Depression-era times that produced folk hero John Dillinger, it would take a special set of social circumstances to create another Whiskey Robber. Even now, much of the media that fed Attila’s legend and that had exploded onto the scene when press freedom arrived—including László Juszt’s hit show, Kriminális—no longer exist.
Whether that makes Attila one of the luckiest or unluckiest people in the world is debatable. He worries whether he will have any chance to get a job or have a family when he is released in 2016 at age forty-nine. (It is possible, but unlikely, that he could be paroled as many as five years earlier for good behavior.) Yet like his country and his people, all Attila ever really wanted was to be respected and to belong somewhere he could call home. And though that may not have transpired the way he envisioned, it has indeed come to pass. On the floor of Attila’s cell, among his growing collection of history books is a large encyclopedia of Hungarian history, Magyarok Kronikája. Sometimes when he can’t sleep at night he opens it to page 816. There, next to the entry about the Balkan War, the chronological reference book tells the story of the Transylvanian hockey goalie who became known as the Whiskey Robber, “a national fairy tale hero.” On good days, Attila can convince himself it was worth it.