Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  ‘There was a fire on the train,’ Pucci said by way of explanation.

  ‘And Andrea?’

  ‘I lost sight of him.’

  ‘What do you mean, “lost sight”?’

  His father came into the corridor. ‘You were supposed to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘There were three or four hundred of us. It was chaos. He’ll be fine. He’ll be along in a minute.’

  That night they stayed up waiting. Pucci kept trying to reassure his parents that it would all be fine but the longer they were waiting, the more nervous they became. There were accusations and recriminations. Finally, just as the sun was coming up, the phone rang. They were invited to a morgue to identify a body ‘which might be a relative of yours’. His brother’s carbonized body had been found on the floor of the train lavatory.

  Andrea’s funeral took place two days later in Lucera. Pucci was a broken man, immobilized by guilt and disbelief. He became even more withdrawn than usual. He felt his younger brother’s death was his fault and that he had returned home like a coward. His only way to deal with his guilt was to blame those who he felt were even more responsible than himself. His closest friends heard him say that he would find those who had set fire to the carriage and light them up ‘like a Christmas tree’.

  In the following weeks he began using again – not just smoking joints but taking anything that was offered to him: uppers, downers, powders. He was a mess, a violent mess, one desperate to avenge his brother in the hope that it would erase his own guilt. His substance use was part of that erasure but he needed more.

  Marmot, who everyone knew had started the fire, had gone to ground. He used to hang around Piazza Bologna with all the teenage fans but since Andrea’s death, he had disappeared from the scene. For weeks Pucci tried to find him but without success. So, he approached one of his closest friends, a far-right activist with a long scar across his neck: Paolo Dominici. Dominici knew Marmot, and Marmot and his friends were more likely to trust him than Pucci. By then it was July. For weeks Italy, and Paolo Rossi, had been thrilling everyone with their successful World Cup campaign.

  Dominici finally got hold of the young boy and he followed Pucci’s instructions. He invited Marmot to a fungaia (a mushroom-growing cavern) in Via Tiburtina with the excuse of showing him some stolen radios. Dominici and Marmot met at Piazza Bologna late on the evening of 10 July, the eve of the World Cup Final in which Italy would beat West Germany 3–1. They got on the 61 bus to Via dei Monti Tiburtini, the other side of the railway lines. When Marmot arrived, Pucci was waiting for him.

  A few months later, on 7 October 1982, Geronimo got a phone call from Zigano, the same guy who in 1979 had let off the nautical flare that killed Papparelli. Zigano was doing his military service and had obtained leave for a night. He wanted to invite Geronimo out for a pizza.

  Like Marmot, Geronimo was never seen again. Neither body has ever been found, even though there are various urban legends about where they might be. Revenge had been served but it didn’t remove Pucci’s sense of guilt, which if anything was exacerbated. He could only see the worst side of himself, unbrotherly and murderous. Everything seemed pointless. He stopped going to the stadium and to the bar. Over the next few months, Pucci began injecting every day. It was a slow, hedonistic form of suicide.

  The full story only came out a few years later when Dominici was in a drug treatment programme in Calabria. In 1989 he was, as they say in the recovery community, ‘making amends’ and confessed his part in Marmot’s disappearance to his drugs counsellor. Police took up the case but by then Pucci was dead. He had died of an overdose – or ‘in his sleep’ as it’s euphemistically called – in 1986, aged twenty five.

  1982, Cosenza

  To begin with, they thought the strange man in their midst was in fancy dress. He had a tidy beard and wore a brown habit and white rope belt. The rope was knotted, like he was the real thing, but the curva in those years was full of eccentrics and attention-seekers. No one thought he was actually a monk.

  The fans ignored him to begin with but he wasn’t a man who liked being ignored. He started shouting advice to players and ultras alike. He rubbed kids’ hair.

  ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ one of the boys asked him.

  He told the lad that he was a Franciscan friar.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ The man didn’t take his eyes off the pitch. ‘But I could have been a footballer if I’d wanted to be.’

  The monk was deadly serious. He told the boy about the best goals he had scored, the games he had won single-handedly for various teams, winning them promotions. His boasting came naturally, as easily as those goals.

  ‘Father,’ shouted one of the fans, ‘you’ll bring us all bad luck coming here. Stick to your church.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as luck,’ the monk shot back, ‘only providence and prayer.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  It was unsettling having this ecclesiastical figure in the midst of their bacchanalian afternoon. They weren’t sure they wanted him around, but the more jibes and jokes they sent his way, the faster his replies. He wasn’t even one of those well-spoken priests that they had all seen in dark, staid churches. This man yelled in dialect and swore like a builder. And he never went to the tribuna, always the curva.

  One Sunday a boy brought some red-and-blue felt tips to the game, and whilst the monk was singing along with the crowd, he coloured his white rope blue-and-red. But the monk noticed him, slipped off the rope and twirled it around his head like a scarf while singing ‘Maracanà’.

  The monk rolled up to games with some of the children from the orphanage – young boys who were still in single figures, real tykes with shaved heads and lumpy faces. Some of the ultras asked the orphans about this strange man, still half-convinced he was a joker dressed up for the day. But the boys just shrugged and said, ‘He’s Padre Fedele.’ He was, they said, obsessed by only two things: football and the Gospels. ‘That’s all he talks about,’ they said, smiling. ‘That and himself.’

  At the next game Padre Fedele was introduced to the inner circle of Cosenza’s ultras. When someone was on the fringes of the group, it was usual to bring them in and present them to the man with the megaphone so that the arriviste could be checked out. But the monk wasn’t as humble as other fans. He turned towards the lads and proclaimed with a guffaw, ‘You reprobates are the brothers of Christ.’

  Many cheered, more at the recognition that they were reprobates than at the idea that they were siblings of this man’s saviour. Plenty of others raised their arms sharply and told him where to go. But he gave as good as he got, and he could always hold his own in the quick-fire banter.

  Over the next few months they got used to the loud presence of the man they simply called U Monaco (‘the Monk’). He could be a real pain. At half-time, when many were skinning-up, he would brush past them and accidentally-on-purpose overturn their spliffs, spilling the weed all over the concrete. They would shout at him and he would shout back, telling them to give it up. When he heard that some of the lads were going to a brothel, he went to find the lads’ girlfriends and told them about it. Many said he was nothing other than a fucking ball-breaker. Any time the curva went quiet, he would start a song of his own, and even if people didn’t join in, he would stick at it, enjoying the limelight. He quickly became one of the many eccentrics you looked forward to seeing on a Sunday afternoon.

  But beneath his buffoonery and moralizing, he was also doing something subtle. He was talking to these loud, lost young men and changing the way they saw themselves. That aspect of being an ultra that they so celebrated – being excluded, angry, forgotten, despised – was precisely what made them precious, he said. Here was a man of the cloth who genuinely seemed to value them. You, he said, understand the poor, the lame, the broken. You can be the foot soldiers of a new solidarity in this city.

  Many of the ultras thought it was baloney. None of them, except Pastachina, w
ere church-goers and they were instinctively suspicious of anything and anyone that came out of what they considered the corrupt and cosy world of Catholicism. But Piero, as always, was listening. He was thinking about what this loud and lovable monk was saying. The Monk kept saying that being an ultra was so important that they needed to get even more radical.

  There was something in that message that sunk a hook in Piero. It wasn’t that he wanted to lose focus on the red-and-blue. That had always been his obsession. But that focus, the intensity of the ultra life, was deepening. Being an anarchist, Piero was sceptical of anything that came from the state. He believed in living at ground level, which was part of the humility of being an ultra. But now this Monk had come along and was telling them that being an ultra wasn’t just about brotherhood with the lost boys of the terraces, but solidarity with the homeless and hungry of the city.

  At the same time, a new ultra group had come into being. On 9 October 1983, the Cosenza ultras revealed the new group in the home game against Salernitana. The banner was long, the top half completely red, the bottom all blue, with almost playful yellow letters spelling out the name: Nuclei Sconvolti (‘Deranged Nuclei’), with a large marijuana leaf between the two words. The name was perfect. That plurality had an inclusivity to it. And no one had ever heard of an ultra group called Sconvolti before. The word also means ‘messed up’, ‘dishevelled’, ‘upset’ or ‘freaked out’. In time, the name was often abbreviated to NS.

  But it was, perhaps, the iconic leaf that gave clarity to the identity of Ciccio’s group. There was something sacramental in their use of the weed. Although it seemed banal to non-stoners, and heretical to believers, the ultras felt there was something of the communion chalice about the passage of a spliff from one brother to another. As Andrea Ferreri wrote in Ultras, ‘smoking spliff in the curve, like passing a bottle, is a rite which unites people, it’s the glue which, with the passage from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, enlarges the circle, makes it into a single body…’ He called the use of cannabis ‘a collective rite which unites and sacralizes everything’.

  The Cosenza ultras were instinctively anti-prohibitionist. It seemed typically hypocritical to them that a natural substance which grew so healthily in the hills of Calabria should be illegal, when organized crime was flooding the city with heroin. Weed only added to their self-perception that they were bandits, rebels and smugglers. The industrial quantities they smoked also enforced or exaggerated many aspects of their group: on the one hand, zany humour, oneiric creativity and impetuous pranks, and on the other hand, unpredictability, sometimes even mental instability.

  In the ultra world ‘madness’ was invariably celebrated. The ultras wanted to be seen as psychotic. It wasn’t just that the curva was occasionally a repository, or sanatorium, for people with psychiatric issues. They revelled in playing on society’s fear of their craziness. There would eventually be a splinter group of Juventus ultras called Insani (‘The Insane’) and Salernitana had a gang called ‘Upset Minds’.

  Ostentatious drug use was part of that self-presentation as scary, crazed and unpredictable. The Lazio ultras sang ‘We start Monday with LSD / We take amphetamines until Wednesday…’ One of the early slogans of the Nuclei Sconvolti was equally calculated to send shivers down the bourgeois spine: ‘Pipe ai vecchi, acidi ai bambini, Nuclei Sconvolti clandestini’ (‘Pipes for the elderly, acid for babies, [we are the] deranged clandestine nuclei’).

  But in Cosenza there was a distinction between hard and soft drugs. One of their banners, years later, announced: ‘No smack, no coke, but roll [a play on words of their favourite player, Marulla] a spliff.’ Another time, they wrote; ‘Heroin? No – we are ultra’, which implied that they were both beyond and over heroin.

  Luca was, by then, one of the brains of the Cosenza curva. Looking back, he sees the use of the marijuana leaf not as a stoner’s fixation but as part of the group’s campaign ‘against both the police and organized crime that was spreading heroin everywhere. It wasn’t a hymn to the buzz, but part of a war against heroin.’

  1982–83, Roma

  Many fans spoke of the ‘magic’ of those Sunday afternoons. That usage hinted at the transformation that happened when team and fans came together. By some unfathomable alchemy, those ultras who were lonely or lost found themselves in the midst of a riotous, gleeful group. And – even more miraculous – a team that had seemed perennially disappointing, Roma, was reflecting that alchemy, becoming a serious contender for the Serie A title. The magic words that made it all happen were, according to the ultras, the lyrics of their songs. ‘We felt,’ says one veteran of CUCS, ‘as if the game couldn’t start without us.’

  Romans have always enjoyed bar songs. Taking those bawdy, ironic ballads from the bars to the terraces created a sense of continuity with the past. It meant that the terraces, too, now spoke to Romans about who they were and where they came from. Those songs wove in many of the myths of Rome: the empire, the grandeur, the circuses. The club symbol was a wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and that notorious legend – of royal brothers reduced to orphans living in a cave and working as shepherds – was powerful because it echoed what all fans feel: we’re better than this, our ancestors were mighty and it’s only a matter of time before we avenge this injustice. The ballads weren’t necessarily heroic but the oompah celebration of boozy idleness in a song like ‘The Society of Pimps’ was relished by many ultras who felt they, too, were the outcasts of the zozza società (‘mucky society’).

  The songs were tributes to the ultras’ dogged determination to be always at Roma’s side: We’re going to ‘grind out the kilometres, overcome the obstacles…’ they sang. Roma didn’t just have some of the best choreographies, blazing red-and-yellow, but they had a fine choir. ‘Tell me what it is that makes us feel friends even if we don’t know each other,’ they sang along to the Antonello Venditti song, ‘Tell me what it is that makes us united even if we’re far apart, thank you, Roma, that you make us cry and hug each other still.’ If you weren’t moved by a love for Roma, it all sounded dreadfully sentimental – what they call in Italy strappacuore (literally ‘heart tuggers’). But if you were a Romanista, those songs simply gave you goosebumps and, as they say, ‘polished eyes’.

  The change in Roma’s fortunes was, in large part, down to a new ruling that, from the 1980–81 season, allowed every Italian team to sign one foreigner. Roma bought a Brazilian midfielder, Paulo Roberto Falcão. With his light, curly hair and upright, elegant style, he seemed to control the game at both ends, scoring goals but also making interceptions and goal-line clearances. He could pass with a back-heel, a shoulder punch, a cushioned header.

  He had endured plenty of disappointments in recent years. Roma came second in 1981 and third in 1982. Worse for Falcão, his Brazilian side were outplayed by Italy in that 1982 World Cup. But there was a sense in the 1982–83 season that things were looking up. ‘Come on Roma, come on wolves, the dark times are over,’ said one banner. As with the Torino championship victory a few years before, there seemed to be a profound connection between the team – including a young Carlo Ancelotti and prolific strikers like Bruno Conti and Roberto Pruzzo – and its ultras. In the days before internet statistics, players used to phone up the Italo-American ultra, Antonio Bongi, a fanatical memorialist, and ask him to describe their goals again. Franco Tancredi, the goalkeeper, said he longed to hear all those Roman anthems that gave him courage between the sticks. Players hugged ultras, as they did on that joyous 1 May 1983. With the title in touching distance, Falcão scored a free kick against Avellino and instinctively ran towards Geppo and Er Mortadella behind the goal and embraced them. (Er Mortadella was supposed to be doing military service and had bunked off from the barracks for the day; when he was spotted on TV, he was duly punished for absence without leave.) On the day the title was won, on the last day of the season against Torino, the CUCS banner was finally allowed to return to the stadium.

  8 February 1984, Trieste


  It was the first leg of a cup-tie, a local derby between Triestina and Udinese, both teams from the northeast corner of Italy. After the goalless game, scuffles broke out between opposing fans. There were reports of cars with number plates from Udine being upturned, sometimes even with people inside them.

  A twenty-year-old boy with black, curly hair and a half-shut left eye was walking back to his car, a Fiat 128, in Via dei Macelli. Stefano Furlan was an only child. He had just left school and was doing odd-jobs, working in a florist and at a hospital. Eye-witnesses saw three policeman grab him. He was apparently punched and truncheoned and, held by his hair, his head was smashed against a wall. He was taken to the police station, where there were more beatings. He was released at 8 p.m. and got home about an hour later.

  His mother remembers the precise scene when she saw him. ‘When I opened the door he was staring and pallid. His jacket and puffer were in pieces. He had tears in his eyes. “Mum, I’ve been beaten up. A policeman truncheoned me on my head, and then in the station slaps, punches, kicks.”’

  He was feeling so nauseous that he went to bed almost immediately, at 9.30. The next day he didn’t go into work because he had a headache and dizziness. By the afternoon his mother was so worried she took him to the hospital. There he fainted and fell into a coma. Doctors discovered a fracture of the side of his skull and behind it was a blood clot. For almost three weeks his mother sat by his bedside. Stefano never opened his eyes again. He sometimes seemed to squeeze her hand but she was unsure if that was just a reflex. After a respiratory crisis, he eventually died at 10.30 p.m. on 1 March.