As the years wore on and his criminal profile grew, the strain of living a double life began wearing Ambrus down. He was worried about being recognized. And thanks to his well-publicized success, the banks around town were hiring armed guards and installing alarm systems and time-lock safes.

But Ambrus couldn't stop. "It became like an old-fashioned game," he says. "Once I got into the role, I got a kind of urge. And I managed to give the authorities a ride so many times, it became something of a sport. After a while, my main point was to succeed."

He spent nights scouring the city, drawing up an encyclopedia of Budapest's financial institutions, diagramming each one and giving each a score between 1 and 5 for degree of difficulty.

In the summer of 1996, he took on an accomplice, his teammate Gabor Orban, whose father was the team's coach and one of the most famous names in Hungarian hockey history. The two UTE players pulled off 13 robberies together, once hitting two banks in the same day, disguised as policemen.

Their last gig was on Jan. 15, 1999. The police were on their heels as soon as they burst out of the bank, and they caught up with Orban on the Buda side of the Danube. Ambrus made it back to his apartment, where he grabbed his passport, his dog and his car and zoomed off toward the Romanian border. Only minutes before he approached the checkpoint, a fax came through at the guard station with his description. He surrendered without a fight.

Ambrus, who somewhat gleefully confessed to all of his crimes, was relieved at first to be in custody. Finally he could tell his secret -- and because he turned out to be handsome and bright, every media outlet let him do exactly that. The Hungarian rapper Gangsta Zoli wrote a chart-topping song called "The Whiskey Robber Is the King." A cabaret show played in one of Budapest's theaters, including a number in which a female bank teller sings about wanting to get robbed by "You superprince, the Whiskey Robber."

Then, six months after his arrest, Ambrus learned that the government was filing attempted murder charges against him. Though he had started using a real gun after the first few robberies, he had never fired it except at the scene of one crime. Ambrus was adamant that those shots were clearly fired into the sky to ward off a group of people who had given chase. (The court ultimately agreed and dismissed the charges.)

Ambrus told his captors he would escape in protest but since no one had ever escaped the facility, he wasn't taken seriously. But on July 10, 1999, Ambrus climbed a wall in the courtyard, got into the adjacent administrative building, then lowered himself nearly 50 feet to the ground on a line made of bedsheets, shoelaces and phone cable.

Over the next three months, despite being the target of a massive manhunt that included forces from Interpol, he pulled off three more robberies. Meanwhile, "Go Whiskey Robber" T-shirts and pins were being sold on street corners. Newspapers featured doctors giving advice on what type of plastic surgery he should have to elude capture. People were quoted saying they wouldn't help the police even if they saw him. The bedraggled Budapest police chief finally emerged with a statement, saying only, "This is human stupidity. Full stop."

Finally in October the police got a tip that led them to the apartment where Ambrus was hiding, right in the middle of the city. He was recaptured in a raid and thrown in an all-glass cage built for a serial killer. In all, the total take from the robberies was 195 million forints, or $840,000, a large chunk of which went to his partner Orban, who had a 50 percent cut on his jobs. "One less small fish," read a headline in Nepszava.

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"I've retired my business card," Ambrus says now, shaking his head and smiling in disbelief at the craziness of his life on the run. "I'm through with the circus. I just want to have a peaceful life."

Regardless of what his future holds when he is released in 2016 at age 49, Ambrus seems destined at least to remain a relic of a bygone era, a figure 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. Like Dillinger during the American Depression, it is all but certain that Ambrus could not have carried out his 29-robbery streak -- or become the sensation that he did -- at any other time or place.

Whether that makes Ambrus feel like one of the luckiest or unluckiest people in the world is not a question he knows yet how to answer. On the floor of his cell is a large encyclopedia of Hungarian history, Magyarok Kronikaja. On page 816, 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 at least, Ambrus says he can read it and convince himself it was worth it.

"Anyone can go there and grab the money," he says. "But that's not the point. I wanted it to have an afterlife."

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