His forensics expert, who occasionally reported for duty in top hat and tails, was known as the Dance Instructor because he taught ballet on the side. The department had so few cars that his men often had to hitch rides with journalists. His deputy had crashed so many police cars that he had earned a nickname that translates as “Mound of Arsehead”. He led his 13-man team from a ramshackle command post with no working computer.

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 told me that for lack of a better training programme, he taught himself to be a detective by watching Columbo reruns. Once the police confused another building for the bank and ran right past Ambrus. Puffing on a Salem, Varju concedes it is only recently that he has 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 Whisky Robber’s streak to continue. Within a year, he’d pulled 10 jobs and the Budapest police realised they had a serial robber on their hands.”We used to say he was born under a lucky star,” says Lajos Varju, Budapest’s former robbery chief, who dejectedly quit the force in 1998 with the Whisky Robber still at large.

He went to a flea market, where he bought a wig and a toy gun. The following afternoon, he burst into the post office, yelling, “Freeze!” Within minutes, he had collected the loot from the tellers, locked the employees inside and run a circuitous route home, where he promptly threw up.His haul wasn’t much by Thomas Crown standards, but the 548,000 forints (£1,500) was more than he’d ever seen The only problem was that it was too easy. That conviction had earned him a classification as a “class enemy”, further darkening whatever bleak future awaited him there.Seeing no other viable options, he decided to commit the crime but resolved not to hurt anyone. It wasn’t as if this was the first time he’d done such a thing. He had spent two unspeakable years in a Romanian juvenile detention facility for stealing musical instruments from a bar in Czikszereda, a town near his birthplace, Fitod.

It clearly had no security guard or camera and had a staff of just two or three.On Tuesday, 19 January, Ambrus skipped hockey practice and stayed in his flat (he’d moved here from the stadium after a spell living in a former paddock) for three days, drinking whisky and pondering the commission of a robbery. “But I finally realised I didn’t have a chance.”There was a post office near his flat that many people used as a savings bank. In 1991, he found that he could make some money smuggling animal pelts into Austria. The scheme worked for two years until the border guards began demanding too much in the way of bribes to let him through.By January, 1993, Ambrus was deep in debt from another bribe to a ministry official he hoped would get him his citizenship papers “I tried to toe the line,” he says. “He had literally nothing,” said 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 and a dog walker. Among his duties was to drive the Zamboni, the ice-clearing machine, around the rink before games He slept on a camp bed in a cupboard at the stadium. “We thought it was 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, team captain at the time.Ambrus was made the club’s janitor.

He talked his way into getting a trial 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. And though he’d recently secured an official spot on UTE’s hockey roster, he wasn’t being paid a player’s salary because of the way he had landed the job.Five years earlier – only month after arriving in Hungary – he had phoned the hockey club, which had just won its seventh straight national championship, and claimed to be a goalkeeper. He still had no Hungarian citizenship despite having applied for asylum after escaping from Ceausescu’s Romania in 1988 underneath a freight train. I wanted it to have an afterlife.”The Whisky Robber’s streak began on 22 January, 1993, when the world geopolitical order was experiencing a brief hiccup, namely the post-Communist era.