Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  It was also the year that Luciano Re Cecconi, the title-winning Lazio midfielder, was shot dead in a jewellers when, allegedly, a pretend robbery went wrong. For Lazio ultras, Re Cecconi was one of the first martyrs. On 24 April 1977, the Taxi-Driver and his troops got the night train to Milano for a match the next day. When the train arrived at dawn, the Taxi-Driver walked all the ultras to the cemetery where the blond Lazio legend, originally from Milano, was buried. It was a walk of 20 kilometres but no one questioned his command, with songs and beer fuelling the march.

  At the start of that bloody year, Bongi – the smart Italo-American in Rome – sensed which way the wind was blowing. Perhaps because he still saw things with an outsider’s eye (he had moved back to the States for a year when his parents divorced), he kept talking to his mates about the need to make the terraces apolitical. Many of his friends were from the far right, many from the far left. ‘Outside the stadium there were people who were killing each other,’ he remembers. ‘It was tough. I said, “We’re not going to do politics here so lay down your arms”.’

  He and his mates from the chaotic Roma curva agreed to come together behind one banner. So, on 9 January 1977, a new name was unfurled at the Stadio Olimpico: Commando Ultrà Curva Sud. It came to be known as CUCS. Bongi achieved what most capo-ultras could only dream of in this endlessly schismatic country: something approaching unity. He particularly liked the acronym because it seemed to him a remote echo of those American universities like UCLA.

  The game itself that day was a good omen. Roma won 3–0 against Sampdoria with that promising teenager from a few years back, Agostino Di Bartolomei, scoring twice. Bongi and Geppo led the singing: ‘Oh, Agostino, Ago Ago Agostino gol!’ The player had become the beating heart of a red-and-yellow revival. But even he carried a pistol outside the ground, just for self-defence he said.

  A few months later, on 25 May, Bongi went to the Stadio Olimpico to watch the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Borussia Mönchengladbach. He took a tape recorder so that he and his friends could learn some of the English chants. By the beginning of the next season, they had Italianized ‘Oh when the saints go marching in’ in honour of the prolific striker, Roberto Pruzzo.

  Many Lazio ultras had gone to that cup final to support the German side. Grit remembers that they took a black banner with yellow writing: ‘Sieg Heil’. ‘The Germans looked at us as if we were Martians,’ he recalls. The politics of the Lazio terraces were very clear. The flag of Mussolini’s ‘Social Republic’ of Salò was common and the ultras once played a joke on legendary striker Paolo Rossi, walking onto the pitch to give him a pretend pennant that actually turned out to be a black flier for the MSI, complete with its flaming tricolour. The ‘Lazio, Lazio’ chant was invariably accompanied by Roman salutes and, according to Grit, ‘even the many lads who couldn’t care less about the ideology automatically did the salute’. Much of the extremism was imitative.

  They were years in which the choreographies, as well as the violence, became increasingly sophisticated. The use of flare guns was near ubiquitous. One, aimed at the Perugia striker Walter Novellino, actually hit the Lazio player, Lionello Manfredonia. Grit recalls Lazio ultras firing ten flare guns at their Fiorentina counterparts.

  The Lazio solution to political terrorism was the opposite of Roma’s. Where Bongi was trying to impose an absence of politics, the Laziali – after heated debate – chose a side. The main umbrella organization, GABA (the ‘Associated Sky-Blue-and-White Groups’), morphed into something different. On 1 October 1978 the Eagles Supporters announced themselves with a banner that had in the middle of its logo the eagle of the Wehrmacht. From now on, the majority (though by no means all) of Lazio ultras – already closely twinned with the far-right ultras in Verona – were standing behind a long banner that suggested they were proudly nostalgici, longing for the return of fascism.

  Many of the Lazio ultras were militants in the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of the MSI. (The party seemed stronger than ever in the 1970s, winning as much as 8.7 per cent of the ballot – 2.7 million votes – in 1972). The esoteric fascist philosopher, Julius Evola, was hugely influential on that generation of Lazio ultras. In his book, Men Among the Ruins, Evola consoled those who suddenly seemed on the wrong side of history. He created a pseudo-spirituality in which the fascist faithful, like Christian apostles, awaited the return of the saviour (many, in fact, called themselves the ‘children of the sun’, believing that the dark night would soon be replaced by the rising star).

  In 1977 it certainly seemed as if the new dawn had arrived. The first ‘Hobbit Camp’ was organized in Benevento that summer. It was to become an annual festival for those eager to soak up the culture of fascism. (Tolkien had long inspired Italian neo-fascists who liked to quote Bilbo Baggins’ line that ‘deep roots don’t freeze’.) There was a popular left-wing slur that fascists belonged in the ‘sewers’ and so a magazine called La Voce della Fogna (‘The Voice of the Sewer’) was launched. The Celtic cross (an encircled plus sign) borrowed from the OAS (the French terrorist paramilitaries who raged against Algerian independence and tried to assassinate De Gaulle) became the default symbol of this resurgent fascism. It was adopted as the official emblem of FUAN (the MSI’s student organization) and hinted that the far right – as well as being influenced by Evola’s wafty paganism – was now toying with Catholic fundamentalism.

  There was also a tension in that world between debate and deed (the A of FUAN stood for ‘Action’). The poster advertising that first Hobbit Camp had a straight arm pointing a finger that looked, deliberately, like a pistol. Evola, as well as counselling patient quietism, had theorized about a martial and racial elite in The Aryan Doctrine of Battle and Victory, mirroring the tension in post-war fascism between biding one’s time and taking immediate action, between being a part of the democratic process and being implacably, even militarily, opposed to it.

  Pino Rauti and Stefano delle Chiaie, the co-founders of Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale respectively, were two of those who favoured action. Both left the MSI, frustrated by its collusion with the musical chairs of parliamentary politics. Both organizations were paramilitary. Rauti’s Ordine Nuovo (though nominally called a ‘study centre’) was repeatedly suspected of involvement in terrorist atrocities, from the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969 to the killing of investigative magistrates like Vittorio Occorsio. Nonetheless, from 1972 to 1992 Rauti was an elected member of the Chamber of Deputies, even becoming, later, the leader of the MSI. Meanwhile, Delle Chiaie – moving first to Spain and then Chile – became a confidant of Nazi-fascist fugitives throughout the Hispanic world.

  The overlap between that not-quite underworld of far-right sympathizers and the Lazio terraces was obvious. Pierluigi Concutelli was part of Ordine Nuovo and described himself as a ‘Lazifascista’ – a play on words, echoing ‘nazi-fascista’. Whilst in prison for the murder of Vittorio Occorsio – an examining magistrate whom he blamed for the prosecution of far-right terrorists – Concutelli committed another two murders, strangling two far-right terrorists who were about to grass. When he emerged from prison after thirty-four years, he was given the shirt of the then Lazio midfielder, Pavel Nedved.

  Many of the mainstream Lazio fans, those who simply loved the white-and-light-blue of Lazio, were unaware how much the terraces were being politicized. After all, the eagle had been a symbol of the team ever since 1900. A trained eagle flew from the stands to the pitch at each game, and the club’s anthem was ‘Fly, Lazio, Fly’. So, many didn’t realize or else turned a blind eye to the Nazi associations of the new ultra group.

  The Eagle’s new banner, like that of Roma, seemed blessed by the sporting result of Lazio–Juventus on 1 October 1978, with Bruno Giordano scoring two sensational goals. In the first, he was on the edge of the area when the ball came to him. He was almost falling over, leaning backwards on his right foot as he swung his left, hitting a volley so hard that Dino Zoff in the Juventus goal didn’t even see it
. But it was his second goal, Lazio’s third, that stuck in the mind. In an almost identical position, he received the ball from a left-wing cross and with his first touch, on the instep of his right foot, dinked it over the Juventus defender. He looked up, saw Zoff rushing towards him, and calmly put the ball in the far corner of the net as two Juventini rushed back in vain. The whole action took all of two seconds.

  1978 was as violent as the previous year, marked by more tit-for-tat killings. Both factions had their martyrs. On 7 January two far-right militants were shot outside the offices of the MSI in Acca Larentia, in Rome. That evening, when a journalist allegedly disrespected the victims by flicking a cigarette butt in a pool of blood, a riot began in which a third young man was killed by a police officer. Other deaths followed. The father of one of the murdered young men committed suicide. Then, on the first anniversary of Acca Larentia, another militant, Alberto Giaquinto, was killed by police.

  That slaying of three camerati (the fascist equivalent of ‘comrades’) represented a decisive break for the far right. Youthful militants no longer trusted either the MSI or police to protect them. Some renounced extremism altogether but others became even more radical. A far-right terrorist organization, NAR (the ‘Nuclei of Armed Revolutionaries’), was founded and became involved in various executions and the bombing of Bologna railway station in which eighty-five people were killed in 1980. One of NAR’s leaders was the Laziale Alessandro Alibrandi, known as Ali Babà. Another nascent neo-fascist movement, called Terza Posizione (‘Third Position’) attempted with much ideological gymnastics to create an alternative fascism, siding neither with capitalism nor communism.

  The killings continued. Two left-wing radicals, Fausto Tinelli and Lorenzo Iannucci, were murdered in a Milanese social centre. Valerio Verbano, an activist in the far-left group, Autonomia Operaia, was killed in his home in Rome, probably because he was compiling a list of neo-fascist activists. Angelo Mancia – known as ‘Manciokan’ amongst his Lazio mates – was shot dead as revenge.

  The motivations for those killings were political, but the perpetrators and victims were often regulars on the terraces. The murders of Tinelli and Iannucci were linked to a huge, curly-haired lad who was part of Roma’s Boys. Verbano, meanwhile, had been a member of Roma’s Fedayn. Verbano’s murder was, like the deaths of the two men in Milan, thought to be the work of the NAR.

  There were still many ultras who hoped that their youthful movement could resist the escalation of violence. Geppo was the poet of Roma’s curva. He had long hair and wrote stirring songs, like the doctored Marseillaise: ‘When the hymn is raised, all the earth will tremble, we will sing until death, raising our colours…’ He was often the first to run onto the pitch to hug the goal-scorer.

  In 1978, a magazine called Guerin Sportivo published an optimistic letter from Geppo. ‘The yellow-red support is civilizing,’ he wrote. ‘With violence put aside, our only thought is to make the support more beautiful and folkloristic. We have decided to eliminate violence… we try and teach our kids that we don’t go to away games like gypsies, that robbing in service stations means dishonouring the name of Rome… politics, political parties, ideologies – they’re all things which create divisions on the terraces. What the fuck do they have to do with the Magic? One goes to the stadium to sing, to sing and to sing again for Roma. What’s the rest got to do with it?’

  1977–78, Cosenza

  Everyone knew Luigi Palermo as ‘Zorro’. He had earned the nickname when he cut a Z into the cheek of an enemy. He was a crime boss but in the old-fashioned sense. He made money through contraband cigarettes, protection rackets and prostitution. He was opposed to dealing what he considered the dirt of drugs.

  But rival gangs and even his underlings fancied making more money by dealing heroin in the small Calabrian city. On 14 December 1977, whilst Zorro was driving home in his Mercedes, another car ran into him just outside the Cinema Garden. Two men got out and fired four shots, killing him instantly.

  So began a war between the Pino and Perna families for control of the territory. Over the next eight years, there were twenty-seven murders, including the killing of a twelve-year-old boy. In those years, Cosenza had an unofficial curfew after dark. Not that there was much to do anyway. There was just one bar open in the evening, in Piazza 11 Settembre. Every few months there was another shooting and slowly heroin began to be slung in the side alleys.

  Like every other football ground, Cosenza saw some serious disturbances in those years. In December 1970, during a Cosenza–Internapoli match, fans ran onto the pitch, hitting and kicking the referee. Eventually the hunted official managed to reach the changing rooms but the fans kicked down the door. The beating continued and a linesman’s wallet was stolen.

  There were plenty of supporters’ clubs. The Fede Rossoblù, an informal gathering of committed fans, was run by a thin seventeen-year-old with longish hair called Piero. He lived on the main drag, Corso Mazzini, and had a red-and-blue flag on his balcony. He loved the football team but, much more, he loved all the misfits who found meaning in following those colours. Years later someone would say about him, ‘Piero Romeo gathers all the madmen.’

  There was something both gentle and slightly insane about Piero. He was impatient with the pompous and stuck-up, but he always had time for the local characters and lost souls. With his endless pranks, he was quickly becoming one of them himself. There were stories of him picking up the free little cards of Saint Francis from the sanctuary at Paola and selling them outside the stadium to raise money for his ticket to the game. Once, when working on a campsite with a friend, he dressed as a monk and administered communion to all the campers, slowly getting them drunk as he insisted they take the chalice again and again.

  Opposite his family flat, with its balcony overlooking the main street, lived a friend of his father, a headmaster. The headmaster’s son, Claudio, was a decade younger than Piero but they often used to chat. Seven-year-old Claudio, with his thick black hair, would hold onto the railings outside his father’s office as he tried to impress that impish seventeen-year-old across the street with his knowledge of football.

  What changed their world was the return of a young Cosentino who had been working in Rome. Lello’s family had found him a dream job in the capital working for SIP, the telephone monopoly. It was comfortable, permanent employment. But there he had discovered the Stadio Olimpico and its Roma ultras. He loved that crazy mass of humanity – all the singing, screaming and drug-using. In Rome, Lello took every substance he could lay his hands on. He liked gambling and had the whole array of human vices. His attendance at the SIP offices was erratic and he was eventually sacked when someone phoned in enquiring for the number of Lazio football club and Lello, with his love of Roma, replied ‘Lazio doesn’t exist’, before hanging up.

  When he arrived back in small, provincial Cosenza, Lello seemed almost an alien. With his shades, swagger and insatiable appetite, he looked like John Belushi in The Blues Brothers. He started talking to everyone about how the city needed to up its game. He hung out in the bars – the Gatto Nero and the Taormina – where the fans gathered and spoke incessantly about how every other club in the country had an ultra group. Piero was one of the first who became enthused.

  The name they decided on was Commando Ultrà Prima Linea. Prima Linea means ‘front line’ and was the name of an extremist left-wing organization founded in 1976 that had emerged from Lotta Continua (‘Continuing Struggle’). Like the Red Brigades, Prima Linea was fighting a war, killing its political enemies. The ideological leanings of Cosenza’s first ultra group were clear. The group made its first appearance in 1978, when the stadium ban for that attack on a referee was over. Lello, Piero and a dozen or so others stood slightly apart from the ordinary fans in the main stand. They had a banner emblazoned with the name of the group. They sang incessantly, with Lello on the megaphone repeating as many of the songs from Rome as he could remember.

  One of the lads watching them, sitti
ng with his father, was Ciccio Conforti. Short, thirteen years-old with a curly black mullet, Ciccio was from a well-heeled family in Corso d’Italia. His father worked in the food industry and his mother was a piano teacher. Ciccio was a pianist too. He had drifted towards the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of the fascist party. He sold their magazine, Dissenso, in Piazza Kennedy – just beneath Piero and Claudio’s balconies – and sprayed the then fascist slogan – ‘Europa Nazione’ – on the walls of the city. ‘But the stadium put me on the right track,’ he says, smiling.

  As soon as Ciccio saw the Commando Ultrà Prima Linea, he wanted to be a part of it. He and his school-mate, Nunzio, scratched ‘Commando Ultrà’ onto their school desks. They used to hang around Piazza Kennedy, not to sell Dissenso now but to be close to Lello, Piero and the others who had open-air gatherings.

  The group listened to The Clash on big tape decks, playing ‘White Riot’ again and again to try and understand the shouted lyrics: ‘I want to riot… are you taking over, or are you taking orders?’ They loved the thrashy energy of punk and everything it stood for. They passed round bottles of cheap wine and got pissed together. Soon someone brought some burgundy buds of marijuana down from the hills to the east, from Rovito, and they started smoking weed. Everyone smoked except Piero, who made up for it by polishing off the wine.

  But it was a strangely innocent time, too. Ciccio used to go to the printers at the end of the working week to pick up all the loose off-cuts of paper. He would pile them in boxes with Nunzio and then cut the thin columns into postage stamp pieces, ready to use as confetti to be thrown from the stands on Sunday. They blagged coins from anyone they could and bought toilet rolls in bulk, which they chucked onto the pitch to create white ribbons between the ultras and the turf.