Stealing your heart Rubinstein's real-life Robber is easy to love BY SARA DONNELLY

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber — journalist Julian Rubinstein’s action-packed, absurd, and totally true tale of a Hungarian everyman who becomes a famous criminal — gives new meaning to the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Whiskey Robber has it all. You want car chases? Got ’em. Stripper lovers? Yep, those too. An anti-hero with a heart of gold, a taste for sports cars, and a flair for romance that would make Zorro jealous? Well, read on.

Rubinstein, who lives in New York City and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Sports Illustrated, among others, spent more than three years in Hungary and Romania researching the story of Attila Ambrus, the locally-famed criminal known as the Whiskey Robber whose exploits have remained largely unfamiliar to readers on this side of the pond. Whiskey Robber tells the story of Ambrus — a hockey goalie and ladies’ man whose record of 29 bank robberies in Budapest between 1993 and 1999 jettisoned him to local stardom and earned him the nickname "the modern Robin Hood" of Hungary.

But Ambrus’s story is more than a tale of crime and punishment; it is also the story of a country knocked to its knees after the fall of communism. In this world between identities, cops hitch rides to crime scenes, a popular show on real-life criminals becomes the best chance to catch the most prolific bank robber in recent memory, and life as an outlaw, well, it kind of does pay.

Rubinstein’s book begins near the end of Ambrus’s life of crime. We meet Ambrus — stocky, resolute, and as ripped as Hulk Hogan in his glory days — in a Budapest prison in July 1999, serving hard time for a string of armed bank robberies. Rubinstein’s prose is smooth, if a bit overwritten in the earlier chapters, and he presents the story at a relentless clip with an unfailing eye for the ironic. And there is plenty of irony here, coming from a main character as electric as he is misguided. By the second page of the book, Ambrus has heaved a makeshift rope made of sheets, telephone cord, and sneaker laces over the wall of the prison and disappeared into Budapest, launching the largest manhunt in post-communist Eastern European history and making cops across the city feel nauseous all over again. Ambrus remains at-large for 109 days (and stages three more bank robberies) before his final capture.

Rubinstein then rewinds the story to the beginning, before Ambrus turned to crime, to describe a man lost from childhood — abandoned by his mother, abused by his father, and ridiculed by his countrymen in Romania, Ambrus’s one goal in life is to make something of himself across the border in Hungary. Rubinstein displays a flair for the dramatic and a cinematic sense of pace (Warner Brothers Pictures in fact intends to turn the book into a movie, with Johnny Depp expected to play Attila) as he details the events of Ambrus’s life like a boxer delivering a series of one-two punches. It’s easy to fall for this anti-hero who hands roses to female tellers while robbing their bank drawers, and it’s easy to see why Hungary fell for him, too.

It is this love affair between Hungary and Ambrus that elevates Whiskey Robber from a crime story into a haunting commentary on the tragic soul-searching of this nation struggling to enter the modern world. In Whiskey Robber, the unpredictable socio-politico weather in Hungary mirrors the existential struggle of the robber himself. "Hungary has always been unlucky," writes Rubinstein in the first chapter, ". . . the country has been plundered so relentlessly that defeat could be considered the national pastime."

The failings of this post-communist world are embodied in the chief of the robbery division of the Budapest police department, Lajos Varju. Varju, who is clearly Ambrus’s narrative counterpart, oversees a department funded on a shoestring and staffed by a collection of characters worthy of a vaudeville act — one policeman is nicknamed "Mound of Asshead" for his penchant for crashing police cars; another, called "Dance Instructor" in honor of his day job, regularly arrives to work in a top hat and tails. The cards appear to be stacked against Varju.

Meanwhile, the man who will become Varju’s nemesis cobbles together work as the janitor and part-time goalie for the chronically winless UTE hockey team and is as determined to make his mark, and as frustrated at his lack of success, as the police chief. Life as the scrub gofer for a bad hockey team is not the kind of elevated existence Ambrus had imagined, and once he starts dating a hot Hungarian, Ambrus realizes he doesn’t have the money to impress her. Burdened by debt, he hatches a desperate plan. First, he drinks down the knot in his stomach with a whole lot of whiskey. Then he puts on a wig and makeup. Drunk and reeking of alcohol, he staggers into a Budapest post office. He raises a toy gun in the air. He asks for money, politely, and leaves with the equivalent of $5900, thank you very much. The Whiskey Robber is born. Robbery chief Varju, in a poignant and funny subplot to the main story, casts around blindly for five years trying to catch Ambrus before retiring in defeat months before he is finally nabbed.

Rubinstein’s Ballad of the Whiskey Robber manages to be both hilarious and sad in the way that only true absurdist tragedies can be. At the center of this fantastical world is the larger-than-life Whiskey Robber, a man who transcends the boundaries of culture and clowning to access the deepest sympathies of anyone who’s ever felt alone, crazy, alienated, and hell-for-leather.

Which means, basically, everyone.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com

Julian Rubinstein reads at Longfellow Books, in Portland, on Thursday, May 26, at 7:30 p.m. Call (207) 772-4045.