For those who have never heard of Atilla Ambrus (AKA “The Whiskey Robber”); you’re missing out and I highly recommend this book. This book was both recommended and loaned to me by a good friend from Hungary and I, in turn, am recommending it to you.

Atilla Ambrus came from nothing–a dirt poor Transylvannian who smuggled himself across the border into Hungary (the most liberal of the Soviet Empire). Atilla had less than nothing in Hungary–the only skills he had was raw instinct, nerve, and an almost insurmountable capacity to work himself like a dog.

He became a janitor for a Hungarian hockey team which parlayed into a no-pay goalie spot for a team that never won.

From here, his story gets crazier–he becomes a pelt smuggler, a pen salesman, and finally, the most successful Hungarian bank robber in history. He became a folk hero, revered as a Eastern European Robin Hood and it took years for the Hungarian police to catch him. And when they did, his ass escaped using raw ingenuity.

This isn’t just a story about one man’s will to raise himself from nothing to a household name throughout the world–this is a story about that brief flap of history after the fall of Communism, when Europe was as lawless as Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870s. It’s a story about a master thief who was so drunk that he laughed and bumbled his way through most of his robberies who, when he was finally caught was given a harsher sentence than murderers in Hungary, proving, as Atilla said, “That human life is worth less than money in Hungary.”

Julian Rubinstein is an excellent writer who handles this subject with all the mastery of a PhD in history. The book will keep you reading until the very end and you too will come to admire that “Eff You” spirit of Atilla Ambrus.

I highly recommend this book.

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