Status Updates From District VIII

Most of Budapest’s underworld was here: Tomi “bacsi” the Hungarian-Romanian from Transylvania who ran the pickpockets and bag-dippers who worked the tourists downtown and in the Castle District; Lajos, the Hungarian Harvard graduate whose upmarket brothels in Districts II and XII were all extensively wired with sound and video recording equipment that, according to one rumour, fed straight to the prime minister

His brother, like so many Hungarians, indeed every nationality that had grown up under Communism, was too focused on the short term. Decades under an intrusive one-party regime had fostered a strong folk memory of seizing not just the day, but the moment, for potential profit and advantage. Playing the system was everything. As far a Gaspar was concerned, there was excellent money to be made smuggling migrants

Almost all of his political allies and financial backers dated back to his time in the Communist Party or its youth organisations. The party had surrendered political power in 1989 to the opposition, but the price of the peaceful ‘handshake transition’ as it was known, was that the Communists, now reborn as Social Democrats, kept control of their extensive business interests.

Until last week, few Hungarian politicians took Eniko seriously as a journalist. They did now.
Eniko had brought down Bela Lidaki, the minister of the interior, by revealing he had set up an offshore company in the Cayman Islands to channel EU agricultural subsidies to plant apricot orchards on the ‘puszta’, the wide, flat plain in the east of the country. The orchards did not exist. The trees had not been purch