Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  One of the ultras’ recurring metaphors for the curva is that it is ‘a gymnasium for life’, that it trains you for all life’s eventualities. Sometimes the most important lesson wasn’t about survival in a fight but about avoiding them. You needed to be so threatening that no one would start a row; so united that no individual would peel off and do something stupid. It was always a balance between appearing foreboding but also organized, between not starting anything but, if it did start, throwing the first punch. As they say in Cosenza, ‘Who hits first, hits for three.’

  That strange balance made those away-days to the big cities tense but exciting. The smallest misplaced insult could bring down on the group the wrath of an entire city, so there was a fragile restraint to the antics of the visiting ultras. As well as endless tales of mass brawls, many of their favourite reminiscences from the late 1970s are about passing rival gangs without it kicking off: in silence, with scowls, but with strange respect. The fact that every city had its own dialect, unfathomable to cities only 50 kilometres away, helped maintain the distance. You could give orders and not be understood. Some say that the lack of separated sections for away fans, and the lack of a police presence, actually made the ultras more, not less, restrained. ‘In away games,’ remembers one, ‘you were shitting yourself.’

  But often Cosenza’s Commando Ultrà Prima Linea was too exuberant. The release from a week of work, of nagging at home or at school, meant that the away-days were times of epic drinking and smoking and singing, and people often picked fights before they had weighed the odds. There was the time when Cosenza, having been relegated back to Serie C2, was playing against Turris in late March. Three coaches had taken 150 Cosentini the 300 kilometres to Torre del Greco, squeezed between the Gulf of Naples and Mount Vesuvius. Most were thoroughly pissed or stoned by the time they entered the empty stadium, and they started singing and shouting and insulting the natives. Suddenly a few hundred locals stormed in with chains, metal bars and wooden poles. The old lady serving in the bar at the back of the stadium was even handing out empty bottles to the Turris fans, who smashed them into jagged daggers and charged the Cosentini. After the assault, the group huddled together in silence, checking cuts and bruised ribs, and watched their team lose 3–0.

  That was partly how vendettas grew. If an ultra group gave you a beating on their turf, you made them pay when they came to yours. Until recently, all Italian number plates revealed, in the first two letters, the provenance of the car. It was common on a match day to hunt for the vehicles of the enemy, slashing their tyres, smashing windows and spraying ‘merda’ on the dented metal. Which only meant that the next time you went there, the atmosphere would be even more tense.

  In the 1981–82 season, Cosenza came second in the division and was promoted back to Serie C1. More and more local lads were attracted to Cosenza’s ultras. Sergio was well over six foot, a lanky lad, the youngest of seven kids. His father was from Sicily and both his parents were school caretakers. He had grown up in Via Popilia, the long road at the foot of the old town centre that ran parallel to the River Crati and the railway tracks. He was a good-looking tough, a convinced communist who had ‘Prima Linea’ tattooed on his right forearm. Nunzio, always quick with labels that stuck a lifetime, quickly gave Sergio the nickname ‘Canaletta’ (‘Drainpipe’).

  Paride was almost as tall, but more angular and with bird-of-prey eyes. He was something of a punk, always trying out odd clothes and colours. He was, along with Luca, the brains of the group, coming up with ideas and connections. Vincenzo, a chubby lad with thick hair, was the least mischievous of them all in some ways. He was the only one, other than Piero, who didn’t smoke. He was mollycoddled by his mum, who always sent him off to away games with trays of lasagne that he guarded more closely than his wallet. When Nunzio gave him the nickname of ‘Pastachina’ – evoking a loveable, rotund home-boy who loved his food – everyone knew who he was talking about without having to ask.

  Piero was like an older brother to all of them. Lello, the dude who had come back from Rome, was often away – no one knew quite where. So, Piero had become the leader of the rabble. He was somehow irreverent and wise at the same time. Many of those kids were having constant bust-ups with their parents. Ciccio, expelled from school and always fighting with his strict father, had run away from home. The only things he took with him were a change of clothes and his collection of photos from the terraces. He went to Rome for two days but quickly regretted it and went back. Piero was there for him, able not only to listen but also to talk to his parents. But Piero insisted he was never a capo. It was the opposite of everything he believed in. As he used to say, in tight dialect, ‘Nua sim’i’ Cusenza e capi unni vulimu.’ (‘We’re Cosenza, and we do not want bosses.’)

  Many of the teenage ultras were little more than lost boys looking for a cause. They felt the world around them was dangerous and bent. The Red Brigades, the NAR and the Mafia were still assassinating people across the country. In the summer of 1980 a passenger aircraft was shot down over the island of Ustica, while near Cosenza a crashed Libyan Mig23 was found in the Silan mountains – another Italian mystery that was never solved.

  To many young men, the world seemed rotten. The dream of a workers’ revolt had died with the previous decade, and 1980 was the beginning of a counter-revolution. In the autumn of that year almost 25,000 workers were laid off by FIAT but the so-called ‘silent majority’ marched against the unions. Corruption and hidden networks seemed to dominate the country. A masonic lodge, P2, was exposed, showing that the cream of Italian politics and business were enrolled in a secretive society with decidedly authoritarian aims. Even football wasn’t immune from graft, with revelations that great teams including Milan and Lazio had been involved in match-fixing. The fights were getting ever more serious too: in a tournament in June 1981 between Inter, Milan, Feyenoord, Peñarol and Santos, there was a brawl between rival Milan and Inter ultras involving knives and pistols. Many were badly injured and one Inter fan, Vittore Palmieri, died in hospital. (A peace accord, which still holds, was agreed between ultras from two Milanese teams in 1983.)

  By comparison, the ultras of this small Calabrian city seemed like idealists. The group was often experimenting with its name. The Commando Ultrà Prima Linea had become Ultrà Cosenza, but Ciccio called the inner circle, in English, the ‘Mad Band’. There were heated arguments. There were discussions about money and transport and players, and about new faces. But the group was a sort of brotherhood, which meant that an insult to one of them was an insult to all. They fought for each other and that loyalty – not blind, but born of affection – inevitably attracted even more youngsters. Claudio, the young lad with a balcony opposite Piero’s, was eleven now. Cheeky, bright, eloquent and still with a shock of curly hair, he hung out with the young men who gathered below his house in Piazza Kennedy and longed for the day when he could go away on the trains with them to faraway cities and come back with stories of his own.

  Back in those days there were no barriers between the terraces and the turf. Cosenza’s cheerleaders, Piero and Ciccio and various others, could stand on the grass behind the goal to conduct the orchestra. When Pastachina joined Piero at the front, the curva started another jokey song, to the tune of ‘Alouette, gentille alouette’: ‘Pastachina, cocaine, heroin’, the joke being that he was addicted to his mum’s lasagne.

  Vincenzo – Pastachina – both loved and was embarrassed by the attention. He had become, in some ways, the group’s mascot, the good-natured lad who people could tease because he was obsessional in his red-and-blue faith. Sometimes during a game that was going well, he was so overwhelmed that he would ball his fists and roll them both against his forehead as if he couldn’t believe it. Once or twice he was so overcome that they had to call an ambulance because he was laid out. Blood pressure, he said.

  Then, in 1982, a man appeared on the terraces who would change their lives forever. The terraces of Italy were, by then, full of eccentrics and odd-b
alls, of characters and petty criminals. But no one had ever seen anything like this man. It was he, more than any of them, who turned Cosenza’s curva into a national phenomenon and opened up a debate about what exactly it meant to be an ultra and to live ‘beyond’ the norms.

  1982: Violence

  In 1982 Geppo – the long-haired poet of the Roma terraces – sent another letter to Guerin Sportivo. A few years before, he had urged pacificism among all football supporters. He had been holding out for solidarity amongst the excluded, an allegiance between the ultras even if they had different colours. It was exactly the same hope expressed by the character Cyrus in The Warriors movie, when he urges the gangs to unite against the police: ‘Nobody is wasting nobody and that is a miracle. And miracles is the way things ought to be.’ But now Geppo’s tone was resigned. ‘If I go to Turin, they beat me up, the same happens in Milano, Florence, Avellino, Catanzaro… by now it’s done, I am at last a thug. The scarf I bought I will use to cover my face… Who knows if one day instead of beating each other we will be united…’

  Geppo was writing shortly after one of the most frightening experiences of his life. On 22 November 1981 Roma was playing Inter in Milano. As usual, the Inter ultras had hung their banners all around the stadium and gone off for lunch. Somehow, Geppo – wearing a railway blanket borrowed from the overnight train – broke in with friends and stole, burnt and shredded those striscioni. It was the most galling thing that could befall an ultra group and when the Interisti realized what had happened they stormed the Roma section of the terrace.

  The game itself was fraught, with five goals and a sending-off. But it was nothing compared to what happened on the stands. The SAN suffix of the Inter ultras, the Boys, stood for ‘Squadre d’Azione Nerazzure’, the Black and Blue Action Squads, a deliberate echo of the Duce’s SAM, ‘Squadre d’Azione Mussolini’. The Interisti knifed any Roma supporter they could find. Eleven people were stabbed.

  That sort of escalation turned even the pacifists into knife-carriers. Bongi took the decision to hit back hard. ‘For the return match,’ he says, ‘even I, a peaceful guy, said “it’s their fucking lookout”, you know what I mean? I went after the Interisti. It was one of the few times I was stopped by the police and my dad kicked the shit out of me.’

  Geppo’s admission that he, too, was now a thug went to the paradoxical heart of the ultra world. Like many anarchists and socialists, some ultras longed for a form of fandom that was not prey to patriotism and campanilismo, but that could unite the oppressed. Yet Geppo and those ultras like him were accused of making a category error. Being an ultra implied not just a tight brotherhood, but also allegiance to specific colours. A rainbow was a heresy against chromatic fundamentalism.

  Geppo’s wistful tone was seized upon as apostasy and the magazine received hundreds of replies ridiculing his hope for a rainbow ultra world. A Juventus Fighter wrote that ‘reading Geppo’s letter I was left so ill that, if I had had him in front of me, I would have spat in his face. He maintains that he’s a thuggish fan, I say that he’s a chicken.’ An Inter Boy wrote that ‘if we step on each others’ toes, if we are mightily provoked, we can’t stand by and watch. We react, and in that case, there’s no quarter for anyone.’

  That allusion to provocation underlines how similar the ultra world was to that of the Hells Angels described by Hunter S. Thompson: ‘… their idea of provocation is dangerously broad, and one of their main difficulties is that almost nobody else seems to understand it.’ One suspects that many ultras wanted it that way. If you never knew when someone was going to take offence and fly off the handle, you walked daintily around them.

  Geppo’s reply to the debate was moving. ‘None of us know why our Sunday work is thuggishness, we just do it. All of you have called me a penitent: I’m not, I’m just trying to understand why we have all this anger inside us and why we dirty a clean day like Sunday, why we ruin the party of a game of football.’

  Geppo’s regret showed that the ultra world, so often considered mindless, was perhaps sometimes the opposite, and that violence wasn’t a consequence of thoughtlessness but of despairing analysis. Geppo was daring to hint that football was a charade, that players’ attachment to the maglia (‘the shirt’) was delusional: ‘… when I see Roberto-gol [the nickname of Roberto Pruzzo] under the Curva Sud I hug him and I deceive myself that he has scored for Roma and for us. But afterwards I start thinking and, as usual, thinking hurts. Maybe I’m a thug because I think too much.’

  *

  The more violent they became, the more the ultras were scorned. Like many marginalized groups, they turned the insults to their advantage. They seemed to relish being rejects, as being always ‘beyond’: beyond hope, beyond the pale, beyond civilization. They were the untouchables in the caste sense – dirty, disinherited and dangerous. As things hotted up, they were untouchables in other ways too. The names of different groups reflected that identity. An ultra group in Teramo is called Zezza, a dialect word for ‘filthy’. Other teams had ‘Dreadful Elements’, ‘Incorrigibles’, ‘Lost Minds’, ‘Extraneous to the Masses’ and ‘the Unfortunates’. As usual, it prompts a comparison with punks, who had group names like ‘Unwanted’, ‘Rejects’ and ‘the Worst’.

  It was, at least, safely predictable. They were rebelling against rejection by doing everything they could to ensure that they would be rejected. They obliged people to pay attention to them, even if the timbre of that attention was disdain. The more the ultras detected that disdain – and it wasn’t hard – the more they attempted to offend society’s sensibilities.

  21 March 1982, Rome

  Andrea was thirteen years old in the spring of 1982. Most people called him Puccino simply because his older brother was nicknamed ‘Pucci’. The boys’ parents were originally from Puglia. Their mother worked for the petroleum giant Eni, and their father worked as an engraver. They lived in Via Livorno, a road that ran from Piazza Bologna towards the ring road and the railway lines. The first floor of their block of flats housed the offices of the MSI and its youth wing, the Fronte della Gioventù.

  Pucci was twenty-one. He worked as a lighting engineer and was listened to when he spoke, partly because he was normally so quiet and introverted but also because he could flare up when needed. He was close to the far right but actually dressed like a left-wing hippy, wearing Pakistani shirts and sandals and rings on his fingers. He was one of the leaders of the Fedayn, an outfit founded by Roberto Rulli and associated with the left. Everything got mixed up in the ranks of Roma supporters. In the bar where the ultras gathered, politics dissolved in the face of the Roma faith.

  Andrea looked up to his older brother and was always trying to emulate him: playing billiards, messing around with mopeds and motorbikes, going to the Stadio Olimpico. Andrea wasn’t particularly good at school – he had been held back a year, and one teacher said he spent most of his time drawing motorbikes and engines and putting up Roma stickers high on the walls where the caretaker struggled to remove them. He often skipped school on a Monday to sleep off the excesses of an away game the day before.

  21 March 1982 was one of those days, up north in Bologna. Someone was supposed to give the brothers a lift but it fell through, so they got the train along with Pucci’s girlfriend, Giovanna. Not everyone getting on the train was a Roma fan. Some just went along for a riotous day out, like the short lad with thick, curly hair nicknamed Marmot. He was a Lazio fan really but followed the crowd. He was the sort of person who did daft things to try to be popular. Still only fifteen, he lived with his grandmother in Tor Bella Monica, a rough area of high-rise buildings to the east of the ring road. Marmot’s dad had left home years ago and his mother was in a psychiatric unit.

  The game that Sunday was disappointing: Roma lost 2–0 and the match would mainly be remembered for the goal scored by a promising seventeen-year-old in the Bologna ranks, Roberto Mancini. It was Roma’s third successive defeat. Angry fans traipsed back towards the railway station, hundreds of the
m piling into the carriages of the 17.16 express, singing and shouting. Most had been drinking and smoking for hours. Pucci lost sight of his younger brother but reckoned he could look after himself.

  The train was just outside Orte, on the Lazio-Umbria borders, when someone shouted ‘cursed referee’ and set light to a curtain. Soon afterwards, another hand pulled the red emergency handle and the train screeched to a halt. By now, black smoke was gushing out of the open windows of the carriage near the back of the train.

  The fans piled out onto the grass by the tracks and watched the flames. A couple of them – Marmot and a man known as Geronimo – were proud of the chaos they had caused and boasted that they had taught the authorities a lesson. Other fans were rotating their scarves in the air as if they were in the stadium, only this time shouting ‘burn olé’ instead of ‘Roma, olé’.

  Pucci was walking up and down the carriages, looking for his younger brother. ‘Have you seen Andrea?’ he kept shouting. ‘Where’s Puccino?’ The back three carriages were uncoupled to stop the fire from spreading. The fire brigade arrived but the train was on an embankment and the hoses weren’t long enough. By the time they were able to douse the fire, the carriage was reduced to a metallic skeleton.

  Eventually everyone was ordered back onto the front carriages and the train restarted its journey to the capital. It was a squeeze and Pucci still hadn’t found his brother. Maybe he hadn’t got on the train in Bologna after all. Or maybe he was here somewhere amidst the chaos and they had just missed each other.

  The train pulled in to Termini station four hours later than expected. Pucci told the transport police that his brother was missing, and then he went home. It was the middle of the night but when he got back to Via Livorno, his parents’ lights were still on. He knew they would be worried. His mother rushed up to him when she heard the door open.