Виски-грабитель: История Аттилы Амбруса

Hungarian bank robber and hockey player

Attila Ambrus (born October 6, 1967), alias The Whiskey Robber, is a Hungarian former bank robber and professional ice hockey player. He became notorious during the 1990s for committing a string of undercover "gentleman robberies" in and around Budapest, Hungary, while working a day job as a goaltender. He became infamous in Hungary as a folk hero symbolic of the times in the decade after the introduction of capitalism to the former Communist state. Ambrus was eventually caught and imprisoned for about 12 years, released in 2012. His story was told in the 2004 book Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by author Julian Rubinstein and the 2017 film A Viszkis directed by Nimród Antal.

Ambrus was born in a Székely Hungarian family in Fitod, a small village in eastern Transylvania, Romania, right outside Miercurea Ciuc (Csíkszereda). Ambrus had trouble with the law from a young age for committing petty thefts. In 1988, Ambrus illegally crossed Romania's borders by riding underneath a freight train and applied for political asylum and citizenship in Hungary, the latter of which he obtained in 1994. Ambrus' accomplice on one of his earlier heists, Károly Antal (also a Romanian of Hungarian ethnicity), was caught at the Romanian Hungarian border in 2004 and was sentenced to two and a half years of prison. His accomplice on most of his latter heists, Gábor Orbán, served an eight year sentence in a medium security prison. There have been Hungarian and German theater productions of scenes from the book. The book was optioned for film by Johnny Depp and Warner Bros. of which a screenplay was written that was named to Hollywood's 2008 Black List of best unproduced scripts of the year. His story was adapted to film by Nimród Antal; the film, titled The Whiskey Bandit (Hungarian: A Viszkis), was released in November 2017.