Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari: known as NAR, the ‘nuclei of armed revolutionaries’. A fascist terrorist group, operative from 1977 to 1981.

  Nostalgico: a ‘nostalgic’, someone yearning for the return of Mussolini’s regime.

  Predappio: the birthplace of Benito Mussolini in Romagna. Now a place of pilgrimage for those who want to visit his family home, school and tomb.

  Questura: the central police station.

  RSI: the ‘Repubblica Sociale Italiana’, also known as the ‘Repubblica di Salò’. It was the puppet government, set up by Nazi Germany and headed by Benito Mussolini, between September 1943 and April 1945. The centre of the flag had an eagle’s claws holding a lictor’s bundle.

  Runes: letters of the runic alphabet, a pre-Latin alphabet of the Germanic languages which are now routinely used by far-right groups as symbols and codes.

  Scontri: fights, punch-ups, brawls, rucks etc.

  Scudetto: the Serie A title (literally the ‘little shield’ worn on the shirts of the championship-winning team).

  Serie A: the top division of Italian football.

  Serie B: the second division of Italian football.

  Serie C: the third division of Italian football, also known as the ‘Lega Italiana Calcio Professionistico’, or just Lega Pro. It is subdivided into three leagues according to geography: north, centre and south.

  Sfottò: an insult or banter.

  Squadre d’Azione: ‘action squads’ composed, mainly, of World War I veterans. They were later absorbed into Mussolini’s fascist movement. Their violence – often allegedly in defence of property and law and order in the face of a Bolshevik insurgency – was particularly acute in 1919-20 and gave rise to the word ‘squadrismo’.

  Striscione: a banner, usually containing slogans, jokes and insults (plural striscioni). It can also refer to the ‘herald’ which announces the name of an ultra group. The desire to capture or defend these heralds is at the root of many fights.

  Tessera del Tifoso: the hated ‘loyalty card’ introduced to prevent troublemakers from going to games.

  Tifo: the support: ‘il tifo era piatto’ – ‘the support was flat’.

  Tifoseria: the fans in general.

  Tifoso: a fan (plural: tifosi). A tifoso of Milan is called a Milanista; of Inter an Interista etc.

  Tribuna: the main stand of the stadium (the long side of the rectangle, or of the oval) where the tickets are more expensive and the fans more genteel. A few ultra groups now sit in the tribuna, but almost all are behind the goals.

  Ventennio: the (roughly) twenty years in which Benito Mussolini was in power (1922–43, then 1943–5 in Nazi-controlled northern Italy).

  Map

  Some cities and football teams referred to in the text

  Preface

  Boxing Day, 2018

  Dede was in the usual pub, Cartoons, on Via Emanuele Filiberto in Milan. Cartoons was an English-style boozer, with dark, shiny wood and framed cartoons on the walls. The place was packed now with Inter ultras. It was only a couple of hours until the match kicked off against Napoli.

  Dede wasn’t an Inter ultra. He was a thirty-nine-year-old tiler from Varese, 60 kilometres northwest of Milan. He had a wife and two kids and worked out in a martial arts club where he had won a few tournaments in ‘short-knife fencing’ using daggers. He had ten years of stadium bans behind him. Dede had got a bit tubby recently but he could still hold his own in a fight. He was there with other ultras from Varese, part of a group called Blood&Honour that was twinned with Inter ultras.

  They weren’t the only outsiders that the various Inter ultras – the Boys SAN, the Irriducibili and the Vikings – had invited for the fight. Nice’s Ultras Populaire Sud were in the pub too, since they had a beef with the Neapolitans from a fight a few years before.

  Blood&Honour is also a neo-Nazi organization. It was founded in England in 1987 by Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of the white-power rock band, Skrewdriver. The name came from the motto of the Hitler youth, Blut und Ehre. After Donaldson’s death in a car crash in 1993, Blood&Honour became an international movement with chapters throughout Europe and America. In 1998 a new ultra group in Varese had decided to use the Blood&Honour name, in English, and employ the same Oþalan rune as their logo, a symbol that had been used by both the Waffen-SS and by a banned Italian fascist organization, Avanguardia Nazionale.

  There was a ruthlessness to the Blood&Honour group that had rarely been seen even on the Italian terraces. Hammers, axes, baseball bats and knives had all been used in fights before, but now they were being backed up by a Nazi ideology in which force was the only language. Within three years, the men from Blood&Honour had defeated Varese’s traditional ultra groups and become the bosses of the terrace, hanging their banner – black with white lettering – more centrally than all the others.

  But it was a gang beset by legal problems. Many members were arrested for drugs and arms offences, for bank jobs and beatings. Although one of their leaders survived a shooting, others were less fortunate: a man called Claudino was stabbed to death outside the bar where he worked, and Saverio – on the run in Spain – was stabbed in Torremolinos. One member of the gang now lived between Morocco and Spain and was involved with the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, importing tonnes of hashish through the port of Genova.

  The Blood&Honour gang, though, had a political affinity with the Inter ultras. The ‘SAN’ of Inter’s Boys SAN – one of Italy’s oldest ultra groups – stands for squadre di azione nero-azzurro, an echo of Mussolini’s squadre d’azione. The leader of Boys SAN was called ‘Il Rosso’ (‘Red’) and, with other ultra leaders, he had planned this attack on the Neapolitan ultras with precision. For weeks some of his crew had infiltrated the Neapolitan’s social media accounts. Look-outs on mopeds waited to catch sight of the Neapolitans’ convoy as they came off the ring road. Other Inter ultras sat in another pub, the Baretto, to distract the undercover cops.

  When the call came through – ‘They’re turning into Via Novara now’ – about a hundred men in twenty cars raced to Via Fratelli Zoia, a road that runs perpendicular to Via Novara. It was the ideal place for the ambush because it was near the stadium and a couple of large, dark parks were good for getting lost in or for dumping weapons. None of the ultras were packing anything: all the weapons – billhooks, lump hammers, crowbars – were being stored at the site of the ambush.

  The Neapolitan ultras were travelling in three nine-seater minibuses and two cars. The attack started with a homemade hand grenade – what Italians call a ‘paper bomb’ – chucked in front of the first car. About a hundred Inter ultras now ran onto the road. Red flares were thrown onto the dual carriageway. Both lanes were lit up by the hissing sticks. Against that glare, silhouetted men – holding bars, bats and with faces covered by hoods, scarves and balaclavas – raced towards the vehicles.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ many were shouting, their arms raised. The noise sounded like a war cry, an ululation of playful disdain. More paper bombs were thrown. Car alarms were now going off, giving a rhythm to the chaos. Dogs were barking.

  The Neapolitans piled out of their vehicles and it kicked off. Hooded silhouettes raced towards each other, punching, jabbing, kicking, jeering. Metal bars were thrown, rattling as they cartwheeled across the asphalt.

  It was hard to see anything now. The firecrackers and flares created a dense fog. One of the Neapolitans’ vehicles pulled into the other lane and hit something. It felt as if the van was driving over a couple of spongy speedbumps. People were shouting, smashing their palms on the side of the van.

  ‘He’s yours, he’s yours,’ the Neapolitans screamed to the Inter ultras.

  ‘Truce, truce,’ others shouted.

  And there it came to a standstill. They stopped fighting as if it had all been just a game. The Neapolitans stepped back and let some Interisti through to retrieve the body. Dede’s legs seemed twisted unnaturally and his ribcage looked wrong. Three men picked him up but it
was like lifting a soggy cardboard box. What should have been rigid was too soft to carry properly.

  When Dede died that night in Milan’s San Carlo hospital, it was yet another death to lay at the door of the ultras. The story had everything necessary to depict them as the embodiment of evil. Here were drug-dealing neo-Nazis who had planned an almost military ambush. The fact that the Neapolitan defender, Kalidou Koulibaly, was racially abused throughout the subsequent match only seemed to confirm the impression that the ultras were scum.

  But behind the headlines, the story was far more subtle. When police looked at footage of the fight, filmed from balconies and captured by security cameras, it became obvious that there was actually minimal contact between the groups. They mostly stood apart, insulting each other and throwing metal bars. Considering that there were about a hundred Interisti armed with sharp and heavy tools used for forestry and building, the list of injuries was exceptionally short. The one fatality was accidental, not intentional. Many eye-witnesses even said that the Inter ultras applauded the Neapolitans for handing over the dying man, as if the whole aggression was contained within a ritualistic, role-playing framework that could be paused when real life, and death, intervened.

  It suited everyone to exaggerate the violence. It was a great story for journalists. It suited the police narrative that the ultras were part of a menacing mob. Even the ultras themselves tried to depict the encounter, with embellishment and bravado, as an epic confrontation in which, as one said, ‘we showed ourselves worthy of honour’. In speaking about ‘slicing up the faces of the enemy’, they made themselves feared. The ultras are actually, often, happy to be blamed for what they don’t do because it adds to their reputation amongst the only people whose judgement they care about – other ultras.

  The more you investigate, though, the more you see a conspiracy of disinformation on all sides. Nothing is quite as it seems. The story told by the police is invariably the complete opposite to the story told by the ultras. And because it’s far easier, and safer, for journalists to talk to the police, it’s usually only the official narrative that is heard. The ultras become scapegoats and they, in turn, scapegoat the police and journalists. But for all their devil-may-care attitude, the ultras are weary of being misunderstood. Unlike Sonny Barger, the Hells Angel leader who once told Hunter S. Thompson ‘nobody never wrote nothin’ good about us, but then we ain’t never done nothin’ good to write about’, the ultras – whilst never denying the violence and mayhem they create – believe they have done a lot of good. But to see this, you have to be with them, to live alongside them. ‘You’ll never understand us,’ they always say, ‘unless you’re with us.’

  PART ONE

  Present Day, Pescara: Siena v. Cosenza in the Lega-Pro (Serie C) Final

  Ciccio Conforti is overlooking a horseshoe of 12,000 Cosenza fans from high up in the curva. He’s in his mid-fifties now, with curly grey hair and aviator shades. His pregnant partner is by his side. Back in the glory days of the 1980s he was one of the brains behind the Cosenza ultras. In any other city he would have been called a capo but Cosenza is too anarchic and egalitarian for bosses. He’s just known as Zu Ciccio (‘Uncle Ciccio’).

  Almost all his old gang are here for this massive game. It’s the grand final to reach the promised land of Serie B, Italy’s second division. It’s been decades since Cosenza was last promoted to this division. It’s a hot evening in June and there’s a sense that this year, at last, luck is on the side of the small Calabrian city. There are ultras from Genoa and Ancona here too, to support the Cosenza groups with whom they’re twinned. The only ones missing are the diffidati, the ‘mistrusted’ who are excluded from the stadiums for years at a time.

  Diffidati sempre presenti! Goes up the chant, repeated throughout the game with a hand-clap echo of the syllables: ‘The mistrusted are always present!’

  Ciccio’s group was called Nuclei Sconvolti (the ‘Deranged Nuclei’). It sounded deliberately like a sleeper cell of stoners. Their symbol was that spikey green leaf so well known to tokers. But beyond all the provocation, they felt that there was something profound to what they were doing.

  ‘For me “ultra” was a sacred word,’ Ciccio says wistfully. ‘I would have done everything and more for that world. I was an ultra long before I was a fan.’

  The word ‘ultra’ meant, originally, ‘other’ or ‘beyond’, like the Italian altro and oltre. To be an ultra implies that you’re an insurgent, a revolutionary, a brigand, a partisan, a bandit, a radical and a rascal. To the bourgeois, an ultra is way beyond the pale, the wrong side of the tracks and then some.

  Marco Zanoni (one of the leading figures in Verona’s Yellow-Blue Brigade) once said: ‘I think that someone who frequents the curva is an idealist. At the end of the day, he goes to support the team of his city and we know that an idealist can, in certain circumstances, become a tough, even an extremist.’ That’s the other meaning of ultra: ‘extreme’, like the English ‘ultra-hardline’. The ultras are the extremists, the guerrillas, of Italian football.

  Of the 12,000 in the curva this evening, probably only a few hundred are ultras (official estimates suggest there are about 40,000 ultras in the whole country, although ultras themselves say the figure is far higher). They’re the ones at the centre of the curva, singing incessantly to dissipate the tension: oh, la vinciamo noi, they sing repeatedly (‘we’re going to win’).

  The game kicks off. Immediately, Siena are putting Cosenza, playing in white with a red-and-blue trim, under pressure. Siena’s midfielders are running beyond their bearded striker, pulling the Cosenza defence this way and that.

  ‘Sono puliti, cazzo,’ says Ciccio. ‘Fuck, they’re neat.’

  If you look at the clothing, it’s obvious who is an ultra. ‘You’ll never have us as you want us’ say their T-shirts. The ultras say they’re fighting brutal state repression, and that their insurgency is a quasi-sacred act: la fede non si diffida say many of the other T-shirts, meaning ‘you can’t mistrust the faith’. Most of their headline concepts sound strangely spiritual: ‘congregation’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘presence’.

  Weirdly, one of the ways to spot the ultras is that many aren’t paying attention to the game. The skinny man leading the singing with a megaphone is called Lastica (Elastic) and he has his back to the game, as do almost all his lieutenants. They are watching the troops. The more long-in-the-tooth ultras work the curva like hosts at a party. They chat and argue on the walkways, often only looking over each others’ shoulders at the pitch every now and again to see what all the noise is about. Being an ultra isn’t about watching the football, but watching each other: admiring the carnival on the curva, not the game on the grass.

  The contrast between their self-perception and what the bien-pensant say about them could hardly be more marked. The vast majority of Italians consider the ultras degenerate fuck-ups who have nothing decent to contribute to society. They are often described as sub-humans (‘animals’ is a common insult, as is pezzi di merda, ‘pieces of shit’). The President of Genoa, Enrico Preziosi, in one prolonged rant, once said that ‘certain ultras should be wiped from the face of the earth’. ‘In Italian football,’ the football manager Fabio Capello once complained, ‘the ultras are in control.’ Throughout their fifty-year history, the ultras have been, critics say, masked and violent criminals, sacking cities at every away game. They embody suspect or dangerous traits: blind loyalty, tribal affiliation, omertà towards the police, cave-man masculinity and brute muscle. At worst they have become the willing foot soldiers of both organized crime and of Italy’s fascist revival.

  The ultra world is so contradictory that there’s truth in both portraits. Those contradictions are constantly in evidence. They are football fans who don’t much care about football. They’re adamant that politics should be kept out of the terraces, and yet many terraces are profoundly politicized. It’s a druggy world which has, however, often helped people stay clean. The ultra milieu overlaps with the Mafi
a, but the ultra world has, far more often, been a sanctuary from it. The ultras are intolerant but can also be incredibly inclusive. Violence is integral to them but so is altruism. They are responsible for acts of great charity at times when the Italian state has been, as it often is, absent. The ultras embody many of the themes that intrigue us as humans: they’re obsessed by loyalty and affiliation and belonging; they reflect solidarity and cohesion as well as crime, violence and greed. They constantly seem to be asking the question of what it is to be a man in a world in which muscle and manliness are, for understandable reasons, considered suspect.

  *

  Suddenly, a goal. The stadium is going berserk. There’s a forward surge, and people fall forwards, catching each other and hugging all at once. The goal was at the far end, a simple cut-back from Tutino (on loan from Napoli) and Bruccini stuck it away. People are bouncing now, jumping up and down, rewinding the songbook.

  ‘Che bello è, quando esco di casa,’ we sing (‘How beautiful it is, when I get out of the house…’), ‘per andare allo stadio, a tifare Cosenza…’ (‘to go to the stadium to support Cosenza…’). The simple, stirring music was taken from the chorus of a drab pop song by the Italian singer, Noemi.

  There are dozens of ultra groups in Cosenza but they come together in two different umbrella groupings: the Curva Sud 1978 and the Anni Ottanta (a tribute to the glory years of the 1980s). They have been feuding and fighting all season. Claudio, one of the wise heads of the city with friends in both camps, says that ‘ultra’ means superunismo (‘superunity’). But despite that, almost all stadiums are divided into different sectors for warring ultras who support the same team. The splits occur for all sorts of reasons. The main factor is simply the defining stance of the ultra: it’s all about being intransigent, uncompromising and unflinching. You never step backwards. Mai in ginocchio, is another slogan (‘never on your knees’). And so, just like Italian politics, groups splinter and fight each other. Today, though, there’s a peace agreement. In this show-piece game for the big prize, there’s an armed truce between the rival groups.