The Whiskey Robber's streak began on Jan. 22, 1993, Bill Clinton's first day as president of the United States. The world geopolitical order, it would turn out, was in a brief hiccup, the post-communist era. It was a disillusioning time for the people and for some of the political leaders. The economy in Hungary was so bad that the prime minister decided to bring in extra money by renting out rooms in Parliament.

Corruption and cronyism, thought to have been rampant under communism, were plaguing the process of privatizing the country's resources, real estate and businesses, leaving nothing for those without connections to power. The level of disgust was so high that people began describing the era they were living in as szabad rablas, or "free robbery," a term that hadn't been used in Hungary since the Nazis pillaged Budapest at the end of World War II.

In 1993, Ambrus had only recently secured a position on the UTE hockey roster. He still had no Hungarian citizenship despite having applied for political asylum after escaping from Ceausescu's Romania in 1988 underneath a freight train. After a month in Hungary, he phoned the UTE hockey club, which had won seven straight national championships.

Claiming to be a goaltender, he talked his way into getting a tryout that went so incredibly badly -- the players made a sport of trying to break his nose and succeeded -- that out of pity, he was taken on. "We thought it was simply amazing that someone wanted to be a part of our team so badly even though they'd obviously had nothing to do with hockey in their life," says George Pek, the team's captain.

Ambrus was made the club's janitor. Among his duties was to drive the Zamboni around the rink before games and between periods. He slept on a cot in a closet at the stadium. "He had literally nothing," says Janos Egri, a UTE player.

Ambrus ate his meals at churches and, to make ends meet, worked as a gravedigger, a door-to-door pen salesman, a dog walker and a building superintendent. In 1991, he found that he could make money smuggling animal pelts from a poacher in Transylvania to a mountain-lodge owner in Austria's Tryoleans. The scheme worked for two years until the border guards began demanding too much bribe money to let him through.

By January 1993, Ambrus was deep in debt from a bribe paid to a ministry official he hoped would get him his citizenship papers. "I tried to toe the line," he says. "But I finally realized I didn't have a chance."

There was a post office down the street from his apartment that many people used like a savings bank. It clearly had no security guard or security camera and operated with a staff of just two or three.

Ambrus skipped hockey practice and stayed home (he'd moved from the stadium first to a former horse paddock and then to a small apartment) for three days, drinking whiskey and pondering the commission of a robbery. It wasn't as though he'd never done such a thing. He had spent two unspeakable years in a Romanian juvenile detention facility for stealing music instruments from a local pub in Czikszereda, the eastern Transylvania mountain town near his birthplace, Fitod (population 1,500). That conviction had earned him a classification as a "class enemy," further darkening whatever bleak future awaited him there.

Seeing no other good options, he decided to do the job but resolved not to hurt anyone. He went to a flea market and bought a wig and a toy gun. The following afternoon, he burst into the small post office, yelling, "Freeze!" Within minutes, he collected the loot from the tellers, locked the employees inside, and then ran a circuitous route home, where he promptly puked.

His haul wasn't much by Thomas Crown standards, but the 548,000 forints ($5,900) was more than he'd ever seen in his life. In fact, the problem was that it was too easy. Within a year's time he'd pulled 10 jobs, and the Budapest police -- and media -- realized they had a serial robber on their hands.

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"We used to say he was born under the star of luck," says Varju, the robbery-division head who dejectedly quit the police force in 1998 with the Whiskey Robber still at large. Puffing on a Salem, Varju concedes that only recently has he been able to talk calmly about the case that dominated his life for six years.

Fairly or not, Varju took most of the heat for the slapstick mishaps that enabled the Whiskey Robber's streak to continue. Once the police confused another building for the victimized bank and ran right past Ambrus. Another time, two members of the department crashed their cars into each other en route to a robbery scene.

But the bigger problems with the investigation had little to do with Varju, who for lack of a better training program taught himself to be a detective by watching "Columbo" reruns. He led his 13-man team from a ramshackle command post on the fifth floor of robbery headquarters, with no working computer. His deputy had crashed so many police cars that he had earned a nickname that translates as "Mound of Asshead." His forensics expert, who occasionally reported for duty in top hat and tails, was known as Dance Instructor because he taught ballet on the side.

The department had so few cars that his men often had to hitch rides with the media to crime scenes. Once in 1996, after Scotland Yard pronounced a discount bin surveillance camera tape of the Whiskey Robber in action worthless, Varju resorted to seeking help on the case from a psychic.

"We knew he was a soldier or some kind of athlete because he ruled the situation when he was in action and would jump over counters like a cat," Varju says. "He was really focused, really disciplined and oddly, really polite."

It wasn't much to go on, but the media ate it up. "It's not impossible that he's giving the money to the poor," wrote the daily Nepszava in 1996.

In fact he wasn't. Ambrus became a regular fixture at the city's roulette tables and at the Cat's Club, a high-class brothel frequented by politicos and mobsters in Szentendre, 45 minutes north of Budapest. (The owner, who was later killed in a mafia car bombing, used to yell, "Chicky Panther!" when Ambrus showed up, referring to his hockey nickname that was derived from his catlike speed and his roots in Czikszereda.)

Ambrus had also never been on a plane before, but after becoming a bank robber he visited exotic locales around the world, including Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya, Thailand and Bali, with a revolving group of girlfriends.

His teammates were shocked when he first showed up at the stadium in a shiny new Opal. "After all, he was wearing our underwear," Egri says. Ambrus claimed he was working as a bodyguard for important people or that the pelt-smuggling business was going well. No one pried further. Almost all of them had their own questionable side endeavor, and Ambrus was generous with the money, paying for food and drinks and solely financing the renovation of the team's fetid locker room.

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