When I started working on Ballad of the Whiskey Robber in 2001, I believed in my gut that it was not only the greatest story I'd ever heard in my life but that it was a story people could connect to. Here was an anti-establishment figure who'd responded to his political disillusionment by carrying off a series of outrageous, non-violent bank heists that ridiculed the government and the police forces of post-communist Hungary. I sometimes felt like he was the sort of figure we desperately needed here in the States. Except this guy hailed from Transylvania, was an animal pelt smuggler and a professional hockey goalie (a terrible one). He was named Attila and he was, as far as I could (and can) tell, the most popular living folk hero in the world, a man who had inspired cabaret theater shows, protests, and soon much more.

After the initial publication of my book in 2004, I began to get emails from people around the world, many of whom wanted to write to Attila in the maximum security prison, where he still resides. Those correspondences led to an international toast to Attila last October on his thirty-eighth birthday. Fifteen cities around the world participated. At the celebration in New York, I played and sang a song I'd written about Attila. And I soon discovered I wasn't the only one who had put his story to music. Four other bands (two in the U.S., one in Germany, and one in Hungary), one of whom had named themselves The Whiskey Robbers, had also written songs about him.

That was the genesis of the audio performance project. All of those bands offered the rights to the songs for a special music tribute, and they all appear on the CD. In addition there are outtakes from a radio cabaret-style performance of the book with an incredible cast of performers, all of whom volunteered their time to the project, among them: Eric Bogosian, Tommy Ramone, The Daily Show's Demetri Martin, writers Jonathan Ames, Gary Shteyngart, Arthur Phillips, Samantha Power, Darin Strauss, and the band One Ring Zero. Attila himself recorded an introduction to the production from the prison.

In the spring, since Attila's supporters continued growing and I simply didn't have time to keep up with mailing all of them back, I asked him (through my interpreter) if he would be interested setting up a website so he could communicate with the outside world. He loved the idea and though it's been difficult for him to post regularly, he is now a blogger at myspace.com/thewhiskeyrobber.

And today, thanks to some technically savvy Whiskey Robber supporters in Hungary and here in New York, a video clip with never-before-seen footage is going up on youtube.com, which you can see here.

One of the nice things for me personally about the long half-life of the Whiskey Robber project has been the opportunity for collaboration, which is something I as a writer don't often get. The audio performance production was nearly six months of work in the studio, first recording my song with a full band sound, then sitting in the control room on the intercom with all of the performers as they interpreted the real people (like Bubu the hockey goon, the inept police deputy "Mound of Asshead," etc) I'd come to know so well while reporting the book. There were many twelve-hour days doing take after take to get what we wanted but the fatigue was tempered by the fact that the performers were so good and so funny that the producer and I were literally falling off our chairs laughing. I know Attila would've been laughing, too. He loved the idea of recording the performance's introduction. But his story was always comic and tragic and there's no simpler reminder of that than the thought of him sitting in that maximum security prison on the Hungarian-Slovakian border for another ten years.

"Punchy, hilarious and apparently even true, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber gives hope to anyone who ever smuggled an animal pelt, climbed aboard a Zamboni, or pondered whether truth can be better than fiction. Mr. Rubinstein has committed a high-wire, bravado act of journalism."
— Gary Shteyngart