Clinging to the bottom of a locomotive, this daring young Transylvanian escapes the deprivations of Nicolai Ceacescu’s Romania and lands in the politically- and economically-transforming world of early 1990s Hungary.

Displaying the willfulness that will come to define him, this brash young man phones a local Budapest hockey club and demands that he be given a try out in goal. Once on the ice, it is clear to the coaches and the players that, when it comes to hockey, this so-called goalie is an impostor. Unable or unwilling to admit this fact to himself -- and undaunted by the slap shots aimed at his head by his future teammates – our hero guts it out. Two hours and one broken nose later, the team’s captain is, despite himself, impressed.

“It’s simply amazing,” Pek said, “that there is a person on this planet who wants to be goalie for our team so badly even though he clearly has never had anything to do with hockey before in his life.”

So begins the saga of Attila Ambrus, the unpaid back-up goalie for one of Hungary’s most prestigious hockey clubs, and, not incidentally, the bank robbing folk hero who would inspire the people of a country in the middle of a chaotic transition from communist satellite-state to capitalist free-fire-zone.

"I'm a criminal," Attila said. "But the goal was not to get money at all costs. There were many cases where I could have shot somebody, but the most important thing was that there would be no violence, no blood."

His candid admission of who he was and his nonviolent style of fleecing the system was two of the reasons he was so beloved. The public recognized the stark contrast between the honest criminal and the government officials who looted the public coffers as a matter of course, then played dumb when the cameras were rolling.

In the year 2000, Award-winning journalist Julian Rubinstein considered Attila Ambrus only an interview for a story he was doing for Details magazine. Three years and a couple hundred interviews later, he was finishing up the story that had morphed into the book he'd been compelled to write; a book that reads like some fantastic crime novel chronicling the very real actions of an extraordinary man trying to survive and make a lasting name for himself in transitionary times.

Instead of a dry recitation of facts, you get drama, movement and Henny Youngman-esque one liners. For example, Rubinstein describes a just-arrived-in-Hungary Attila's archaic dialect as follows:

It was like talking to a Hungarian Shakespeare.

And this smart turn of phrase hilariously illuminates Atilla's continued poverty despite the former Iron Curtain's first pangs of ideological renaissance.

While Czechoslovakia's playwright president Vaclav Havel was championing "living in truth," Attila was still living in his teammates' underwear.

Rubinstein earned a Master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism and gradually made a name for himself writing investigative pieces and profiles about such sports luminaries as John McEnroe, Sugar Shane Mosely and Orlando 'El Duque' Hernandez.

Rubinstein uses something called 'literary journalism' (a methodology made famous by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood) to create these profiles and, incidentally, he used it to create this book. In a nutshell, this consists of cross-referencing the interviews you've conducted, the court documents and police reports you've pored over, and using some logic, common sense and imagination to fill out the rest of the scene. It's creative nonfiction, with a pinch of intuition thrown in to taste. Which, in this book's case, is a recipe for success.

Though the phrase 'literary journalism' may sound like an oxymoron, somewhere between the 'literature' and the 'journalism' lays the truth. And it's no lie to say that, by telling the story of Attila Ambrus, Julian Rubinstein has tapped into something universal:

Yet like his country and his people, all Attila ever really wanted was to be respected and to belong somewhere he could call home. And though that may not have transpired the way he envisioned, it has indeed come to pass.

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber is a rollicking crime story, a commentary on the effects of the fall of Communism on the former Eastern Bloc, and a beautiful portrait of historic Budapest, mixed together with the exploits of a kinder, gentler and drunker incarnation of Attila the Hun.