His story was told in the 2004 book Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by author Julian Rubinstein and the 2017 film A Viszkis directed by Nimród Antal.

Ambrus was born in a Székely Hungarian family in Fitod, a small village in eastern Transylvania, Romania, right outside Miercurea Ciuc (Csíkszereda).

In 1988, Ambrus illegally crossed Romania's borders by riding underneath a freight train and applied for political asylum and citizenship in Hungary, the latter of which he obtained in 1994.

[1] Ambrus made a living through a variety of odd jobs, including being a gravedigger and a pelt smuggler, after which he tried out for the professional hockey team Újpesti TE.

[2] Ambrus' accomplice on one of his earlier heists, Károly Antal (also a Romanian of Hungarian ethnicity), was caught at the Romanian-Hungarian border in 2004 and was sentenced to two and a half years of prison.

The book was optioned for film by Johnny Depp and Warner Bros. of which a screenplay was written that was named to Hollywood's 2008 Black List of best unproduced scripts of the year.