Column: Older, wiser, 'Whiskey Robber' a free man

Until he was captured and sent to prison, Attila Ambrus had to be the worst goalie ever to play pro hockey.

At least he had an excuse.

After tending net for Hungary's fading powerhouse UTE club by night, Ambrus donned a series of ever-more outrageous costumes by day and robbed banks during a post-Iron Curtain crime spree that lasted six years and became the stuff of legend. Even as he was being celebrated as the "Whiskey Robber" and the "Robin Hood of Hungary" in cabarets and rap songs, the real identity of the dashing Ambrus remained a mystery to the hapless, underfunded Budapest police for most of the 1990s. And that was despite living large and letting pucks past him at an astronomical rate — 23 in one game, 88 over a particularly memorable six-game stretch, back-to-back winless seasons in 1994-96. You would think he would have been questioned at least once on suspicion of imitating a goalkeeper. But no.

Finally nabbed at the Romanian border in January 1999, Ambrus charmed his Hungarian audience with tales of his chivalrous code of "Betyar" — bandit — honesty and confessed to all 29 robberies. He escaped from a fourth-floor jail window using bedsheets six months later because authorities tried to add attempted murder charges. Then, he robbed three more banks. Three months after that, a tip led the largest manhunt in modern Eastern European history to his door. Now 44, he walked out of prison to much fanfare last month after serving 12 years of a 17-year sentence.

Certain he's done with a life of crime, Ambrus can't bring himself to say the same about hockey.

"It's a fact that I was a hockey player. I sucked as a hockey player; that's a fact, too," he said while walking alongside the frozen Danube River during his first public interview, a TV special broadcast Saturday night across Hungary by RTL Klub.

"But I love the ice and it's in my heart. I want to be part of it again, if the guys let me on the ice," Ambrus added a moment later, "even as a snow shovel."

It's hard to convey to an American audience what a cult hero Ambrus remains in parts of Europe and especially back in Hungary, where the daring exploits of his alter-ego filled the tabloids throughout the mid-1990s. At the time of his arrest, Ambrus' popular support among his adopted countrymen topped 80 percent. For years afterward, he received marriage proposals and groups of fans gathered on his birthday for celebratory toasts. As another wave of social unrest ripples across Hungary, he's become front-page material again.

"I made a bad decision," he said at one point, "that turned into an avalanche of bad decisions."