Before he began writing award-winning pieces for the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Details magazines -- profiling such celebrities as tennis icon, John McEnroe and NY Yankee’s pitcher and Cuban defector, Orlando ‘El Duque’ Hernandez; before he had his own Web presence at www.julianrubinstein.com, author Julian Rubinstein paid his dues in the sports department of the Washington Post. During that period, his main job was working the box scores and stats section of the paper, but he maintained his writing chops by taking any stray assignment that his editors would throw his way.

Since then, he’s gone freelance, penning investigative reports on the troubled Guarani Indians of Brazil and the Hell’s Angels biker wars up in Canada. Based in New York City, he is fresh off the publication of his first book, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, that tracks the real-life story of Attila Ambrus: grave digger, pelt smuggler, bank robber, hockey goalie and ‘modern day Robin Hood.’

Steven Hansen: In our initial e-mail correspondence you wrote of your profession: “... if you had to eliminate one [aspect of journalism], or had to live without one [aspect of it], it would be far better to live without the entertainment journalism.” This statement confuses me because investigative journalism and personality profiles, which you specialize in, are, in my opinion, two of the most entertaining forms of journalism around. Am I misunderstanding what you mean by ‘entertainment journalism’?

Julian Rubinstein: Yes and no. I just meant that the higher purpose of journalism, the kind that is done really to protect people and their/our rights is the thing that is way too often lost in favor of a sort of “infotainment”. Look at the coverage of the Iraq war--a war!--particularly on television of course (which unfortunately is a far more powerful medium than print.) I remember Aaron Brown pausing to take a moment during a broadcast to appreciate what he called the “great investigative journalism” that we lucky viewers were witnessing on CNN. Well, I hate to break it to him but flipping the “On” switch on a camera in a war zone does not constitute investigative journalism. (Or maybe it now does.)

Anyway, it’s been a tough year for anyone who really identifies with or cares about journalism (which should be anyone with a heart, curiosity and a sense of justice). And by my comment, I just meant that in terms of the balance between what gets covered today and how, it’s way out of whack. The Fourth Estate, as the framers of our constitution wisely saw it, was and is vital for us to maintain a semblance of the system we intended to create and purport to be living in. In other words, it’s something we can’t do without. On the other hand, I would say that entertainment journalism is something we don’t want to live without. Of course, we should have both, and both can be valuable. I think the best work combines the two. But substance and context have been so sorely lacking in large part because the corporatized media demands profit not truth.

SH: How have you yourself managed to remain true to your ideals while working within the framework of today’s media conglomerates?

JR: Mostly by working on my own and trying, whenever possible, to pursue the projects that I’m interested in and think are important. That Brazilian Indians story for example took me more than a year to sell. I think it’s an extremely important story--but, incredibly, one editor who shall remain nameless said it sounded too “familiar.” An Indian tribe that reportedly has the highest suicide rate in the world is actually being murdered by the chief of its own reservation and this is too “familiar” to care about? Finally Rolling Stone ran it, but it took more than a year. And my book is the latest thing. I spent most of the last three years working on Ballad of the Whiskey Robber for almost no pay because it was the greatest story I’d ever heard in my life. I’d wanted to do a book for several years and this story had it all--the better-than-fiction characters, the international significance, the drama, the heartache and an absurdity and weirdness I just fell in love with.

SH: Before you covered the story of ‘The Whiskey Robber,’ you had done profiles on many high profile people who most folks would know something of by simply hearing their names. But Attila Ambrus? How’d this story come to your attention?

JR: What really got my attention at first about the Whiskey Robber story was simply the story itself--what happened was so incredible to me that I was convinced I’d be in a stampede of journalists racing to get to this story first. I’m still amazed that that wasn’t what happened.

My first sighting of the story was in Sports Illustrated magazine, where I had previously worked. They ran a small item in the Scorecard section, about 2 or 3 paragraphs, in the summer of 1999 that simply stated that there a professional hockey goalie who had spent the past 7 years living a double life as the “Whiskey Robber,” --an outrageous gentlemanly bank robber. This guy had escaped from the city jail on a bed sheet and was now at the center of an international manhunt. About 80 percent of the country was rooting for him. For me, that was more than enough to fire me up to want to do a magazine piece on this. Which is what I first set out to do.

It was only once I got into the reporting of that magazine piece (which was for Details magazine) that I saw that the story I was sitting on was even better than I realized. I had to do a book on it. That was really the way it felt. I didn’t know (and still don’t) if I will ever come across another story like it.

SH: We’ll get back to the book very soon, but it strikes me that you’ve done stories involving the famous (i.e. John McEnroe, ‘El Duque’ Hernandez) and the obscure (Canadian Hell’s Angel leader, ‘Mom’ Boucher and the piece you did on the Guarani Indians of Brazil). Do you prefer working with a personality the public already has preconceived notions about or a story like the Guarani tribe where you essentially have to build the story from the ground up?

JR: That’s a good question--because I always say that that is a very real divide. I’d like to say that I prefer doing the obscure/unknown better. It’s more interesting in many ways. But then I have to remember people like John McEnroe. He was a dream to write about. But put it this way: If you’re obscure and someone’s writing about you, it’s because you’re interesting in some way. If you’re famous and someone’s writing about you, it’s because you’re famous. There are a lot of interesting famous people, but they’re not all interesting. And obscure people don’t have handlers and all that crap to deal with. They often have other crap, but at least it’s usually not cliché crap.

SH: So which is it? I imagine the stories about the people nobody’s heard of are more work simply because you have no built-in public understanding to work with. But that’s just me speculating. Which type of story has been personally more rewarding for you down through the years? And why?

JR: Hmm. Just thinking of those I’ve done, I can’t say it breaks down like that. I loved doing the story on El Duque (NY Yankee’s pitcher Orlando Hernandez) for instance. He was an incredible character to work with, a huge heart, and he had this beautiful way of speaking. The images seemed so stark for some reason. Being with him in that Denny’s and having him order an All-American Slam and then talk about Castro and how he missed Cuba after all he’d been through, and the waitress “ruins” his coffee (as he put it) by filling it up again when he’d just gotten the right mix of sugar and milk. [That moment] said so much about him and America and his struggle.

On the other side, the Whiskey Robber story was of course fairly unknown, at least in the market I was writing it for and it was also enormously engaging and satisfying to work on. I guess with both of those stories, it’s the richness of them that stands out. How they work on so many levels. The Hells Angels story, for example, or the story of the Israeli ecstasy godfather that was in Best American Crime Writing --those were good stories, but they were fairly straight-forward. I like to have a lot of things going on.

SH: Anyone who reads Ballad of the Whiskey Robber will fast see there are ‘lots of things going.’ There are so many characters involved in this story from Attila himself, his teammates and accomplices and girlfriends; and the men on the other side tasked with capturing him like Lajos Varju and his band of merry men. And the list goes on. Tracking these personalities down must have been a logistical nightmare. How did your work before taking on this complex story help you cope, or was this something you’d never dealt with before?

JR: Well, I’d never dealt with it before in terms of the scope. The toughest overseas piece I’d previously done was the Brazilian Indians piece, because there were so many different parties to the story and it was extremely difficult to figure out what was really going on and who I could trust. One thing that story taught me very well was that in order to understand people and situations and who you can trust you have to first understand their motivations. And those can often be complex. But you have to get to the bottom of that before you can really go deeper. That helped with the Hells Angels story I did, too. So when I got to this one, I was prepared to a degree. And I also had one advantage, which was that, because it was a book, I had the incredible luxury of being able to interview my subjects numerous times. And I can’t tell you what a big difference that makes.

Just last week at a book convention I was talking with Mark Bowden (who wrote Black Hawk Down and lots of other great literary/investigative journalism I admire) about this and it was something we just totally saw eye-to-eye on, which is that there is such a big difference between interviewing someone once or even twice and interviewing them five or six or more times. At a certain point, after a few rounds of interviews, you just start seeing yourself falling into the story, into the person’s life. And that is of course such a key to good storytelling. It also, unfortunately, is a pointed reminder that the news and information that most people rely upon is often only scantly rooted in reality.

SH: Do multiple interviews allow you to take on the role of interrogator, where you notice inconsistencies and contradictions from one session to the next? If so, how do you handle these instances so that you do not alienate the person you are interviewing?

JR: You hit on a very key point. It is crucial that you get your subjects to like you even if you don’t like or trust them. That can be tricky. But if they don’t like you, they’re not going to talk to you. Because you can’t pay them. So it’s a dance.

Often there are ways to ask tough questions without seeming like you’re being adversarial. And that’s why it helps to be drinking something during the interview, which was easy in Hungary, since they like to drink.

And then when there’s really tough stuff, you literally have to just save it to the very, very end. In fact, I’ll often interview someone many times and not ask them the one thing I know I have to ask them. And then I’ll call them back and/or go see them one more time, so that if they go crazy on me, at least I haven’t lost my chance to get other information.

With this book, one thing that was like that was the question of how long Attila’s primary accomplice Gabi waited before giving Attila’s identity up to the police. It was an extremely touchy subject for Gabi, and I knew this from interviewing other people. He would downplay it. But during my last day in the prison with him, I pressed him on exactly how long he waited and what was going on and how he knew that he waited the agreed-upon 3 hours, and ultimately based on all of my interviewing and the documents, I concluded that I did not believe that he made it the full three hours. I have not seen Gabi since then but his mother was so angry at me that she refused to speak to me again once she heard I had come to that conclusion.

SH: No more goulash for you, I guess. And speaking of humor, there is a lot of it in your book. These lines of dialogue by Lajos Varju to his crack crime fighting team struck me as particularly so.

“It’s time to get serious around here,” Lajos said. “I want a full analysis of this Batman. I want to know how he’s flying all over Budapest robbing, and we don’t know anything about him. If you don’t know how to do it, go rent some Columbo videos. …”

Columbo videos? How many shots of vodka into the interview was Lajos when he gave up this information? Did you hear this from more than one source? Or, (not trying to be confrontational here … really) did you make it up?

JR: I did get that anecdote and dialog from Lajos, and he was, most likely, a few sheets to the wind by the time we got to it, as he usually was during our interviews, most of which took place at his dark apartment and while drinking Gosser beer and Jack Daniels. But I was able to corroborate that stuff separately with other members of the robbery department (including “Mound of Asshead” who won’t exactly be thrilled to find that I’ve called him by his nickname virtually throughout the book, but I couldn’t resist.)

SH: You took 3 years out of your life to write this book. You’re a married man. Is there anything you’d like to say to your wife now that it’s all over? (The book, I mean.)

JR: You think I haven’t done that yet? Oh, yes, there were many things to say at many times. To your point, I assume, yes it was tough for us with me being away so much but we also had fun. She got involved in the process; she’s such a good writer and editor herself she was a huge asset to me. As you probably saw, I dedicated the book to her (and to my father who died toward the end of the writing process, in December 2003 after a long battle with cancer.) But I’d still like to do another one.

SH: Which is more of a grind, the writing of a book or the promotional work you need to do after it’s been written? Are interviews like this one a pain in your ass or do you enjoy them?

JR: Ask me when you’re done with your questions. Just kidding. These kinds of interviews are nice because you get to talk about the actual process, and the story, etc. Both sides of the business are kind of grinds but I certainly prefer the actual reporting and/or writing to the promotional stuff. Because there’s that sense that you’re really on some kind of adventure. If you go too long without it, you start to feel kind of hollow, unnourished. You want to give your book the best chance, and particularly with this one I feel like it really is such an incredibly rare tale, that I could be looking back 30 years from now and saying: Yep, I knew I’d never find another story that good. I just got lucky. But I’m definitely looking forward to digging back in on some things.

SH: So what’s next? Are you going on a book tour? Talk show(s)? C-Span? And, in keeping with asking the most confrontational question last: Are you, Julian Rubinstein, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?

JR: It’s been pretty busy with book launch-related stuff. Probably the most amusing thing that happened related to that was Jack Daniels inventing a new drink called the “Whiskey Robber,” which is being served and written about around the country. It’s actually a pretty good beverage. The recipe is on my website. As for what’s next, I’m starting to ponder that. Have my eye on a few stories that could be good. I also had this tear a few months back where a whole fictional story started pouring out of me like never before, it’s about halfway to a novel. I’d also love to find time to finish the documentary about my father that I shot over three years about his struggle to redefine himself as a doctor with terminal cancer. He was amazing, totally uninhibited on camera and an inspiration--outlived what everyone said by 9 years. Anyway, both of those things will probably have to get in line behind something that has more chance of producing a near-term paycheck. Most likely some magazine work and hopefully before too long another narrative non-fiction book. If none of those things pans out, maybe I’ll look for a Communist Party meeting to attend. Koszonom szepen. (Thank you.)

Steven Hansen reviews Ballad of the Whiskey Robber

Visit Julian Rubinstein's website