Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Grit was a short, chain-smoking man who owned a print shop. He had grown weary of what he considered the cosy world of the Eagles – those middle-aged men with close links to the Lazio hierarchy who rode on comfortable coaches to the away games. He knew many of the teenage tearaways and stragglers who took the trains and wanted to bring them together to create something very different: a militarized group that could march to the stadium all together, all wearing the same outfits. Toffolo, one of those teenagers who gathered around Grit, remembered years later: ‘We maintained that their [the Eagles’] mentality was dated. We considered ourselves more “ultra”, more ready to attack if attacked.’

  The group announced itself on 18 October 1987, in a game between Lazio and Padova, with a 9.8 metre striscione surrounded by blue-and-white chess boards. The Irriducibili (the ‘Irreducibles’ or ‘Die-Hards’) were unlike any ultra cabal before them. Often, they did daft stunts. They went to Bologna all dressed up in Zorro masks because it was carnival, or wore giant glasses in the curva, which perplexed onlookers until a huge banner was unwound: ‘I see only blue and white.’

  In an interview with Gianremo Armeni in the pages of Limes, Toffolo – later one of the group’s leaders – was refreshingly blunt about how they got by. ‘We left Rome without even 100 lire in our pocket because we didn’t have it, and I stained myself with little robberies to find money.’ If the ticket collector ever checked for tickets, ‘We scared him and he went away. We always found some way to get into [the stadium]. There was never a problem for food because we raided some service station or bar.’

  Like most gangs, they were frightening not just to enemies but to those who wanted to become members. Those aspiring to join were subjected to the same sort of hazing that exists in many close-knit criminal groups. The Irriducibili travelled in one train compartment and you had to be brave just to enter it. The aspiring recruit would have their shoes thrown out of the train window as they were forced to sing famous songs. If the singing was no good, they were beaten up. Or else the gang would shout ‘doors and lights’, and everything would go dark and the Irriducibili would set upon the aspiring member, thumping and kicking them. Only the toughest, who fought back and showed their valour, would be allowed to join. And if you joined, you would all become mates as together you smashed the windows of a shoe shop on the way to the ground for a pair of replacement boots.

  Many ultra gangs had similar initiation ceremonies. The degree to which you accepted the humiliation demonstrated how much you wanted to join the gang. It created solidarity because membership acquired through effort, pain and even blood was more highly prized than something not, literally, fought for. The belittling guaranteed servitude, humility and loyalty, because it showed the new recruit that – outside the confines of the group – they were nothing. And loyalty was the most highly prized asset. It was the first rule of the streets. Yuri was one of the leaders of the Irriducibili: ‘… the first thing was that [the new recruit] shouldn’t ever abandon us. We left armed with pick-axe handles and billiard balls. We were those twenty to thirty who repeated “We’re compact and united and now what happens has to happen.” I knew that once off the train there was going to be a battle and that you had to demonstrate that you weren’t scared.’

  There was a prankish exuberance to the Irriducibili. As a protest against police escorts to the stadium, they would, on command, all start running, or equally suddenly stop walking at a red traffic light. Playing on the notion that the ultras were the twelfth man in the team (and many clubs, as a fawning gesture of appreciation, ‘retired’ their number-twelve shirt), the Irriducibili held up a banner saying ‘Mister, Facce Entrà’ (effectively ‘Manager, give us a game’). They took the mickey out of Roma fans by using dialect to suggest that Laziali were far more rooted in ‘Romanity’: ‘Da dove sei sortito, dar bagajo de quarche salumaio?’ (‘Where did you come from, the luggage of some salami seller?’). They sang the word ‘Irr-i-du-ci-bili’ to the tune of ‘God Save the Queen’.

  Like the Drughi of Juventus, the Irriducibili had as their symbol a man in a bowler hat, this time swinging a kick whilst holding a flag. They called the figure – taken from one of Grit’s brother’s drawings – Mr Enrich (Grit pretended, to give it cosmopolitan heft, that it had come from an English comic strip). When one newspaper accused the Irriducibili of being ‘stray dogs’, they replied the following Sunday with a banner saying: ‘We’re not dogs because we don’t have owners. We’re not strays because the Irriducibili unites us.’

  That sense of unity came across in their dress code. Grit and his boys had begun to dress alike. To begin with, it was casual gear – baseball caps, Fred Perry shirts, Reeboks and so on. But soon they were wearing bovver boots, tight jeans and green bomber jackets. One of their banners said ‘Blousons Noires’ (‘Black blouses’). Very often the Irriducibili marched with right arms erect, singing ‘Avanti Ragazzi di Buda’ – ‘Forward Youths of Buda’ – an anti-Communist song about the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

  The group met every Thursday night in their headquarters in Via Ozanam or in Piazza Ottovilla, to the west of Rome. As well as planning choreographies, fights and songs, those meetings were also about fashion. The Irriducibili had begun to make serious money selling scarves, flags and shirts across the capital. For Grit, it was simply a way to finance the extravagant displays but he had attracted into his new group some uncompromising characters who saw a real commercial opportunity for themselves. One young man, nicknamed Diabolik, was mesmerized as he watched the notes changing hands. He had never seen so much cash and, now that the Irriducibili controlled the Lazio terraces, he made up his mind to take over the firm and the finances.

  1987–88, Cosenza

  Many older ultras talk about the late 1980s as the glory years of the movement. In an era before televised games and the internet, the number of ultras at away games was so huge that those human migrations every Sunday were called – the same adjective is always used – ‘oceanic’. The stadiums, they say, were always gremiti (‘packed’).

  In Cosenza, a new group was emerging, Nuova Guardia. Claudio, the young, curly-haired boy whose apartment balcony faced Piero’s, had gathered a group of young men: Pietro, Gianfranco, Roberto, Manolo and ‘Arancino’ (Nunzio had given him the nickname ‘Rice ball’ because he was a bit round and red-haired). Claudio’s father had died of cancer and, he remembers, he ‘didn’t have any brakes any more’. His fury and bewilderment were vented in the stands.

  It was the same for many of those young men. Paride had lost both of his parents and was more or less living with Luca, whose father had also died and whose mother was often away in Milan. Luca and Paride started producing fanzines, first ‘Rebel Voice’ then ‘Paper Shout’. There were many fatherless young men on the terraces who were suddenly both bereft and free, grieving and yet energetic. They found new fathers in the curva, veering between Piero and Padre Fedele.

  The Nuova Guardia group had absorbed both the idealism and irreverence of the Cosenza curva. ‘On all occasions, break balls’ said their banner. Their politics were the same as the older generation of the Nuclei Sconvolti: they admired the ‘autonomous’ left. Gianfranco was a teenage boxer who dreamt of opening a gym for kids with problems ‘to teach this sick society a way of giving dignity to everyone’. All of them felt that the society they were growing up in was rotten: ‘With the institutions of this city having such high levels of corruption,’ Gianfranco recalls, ‘we had to give something back to the disinherited.’ Claudio imagined Nuova Guardia standing with ‘the mad, the invisible, the babies, the ultras, the rebels, the artists…’

  But combined with that idealism was the frenzied hedonism of ultra life: ‘those Ulyssean journeys, drunk, trains being stopped, the monotony of your week replaced by the danger of the away game.’ They held their own in-fights and, everywhere, defended the honour and colours of Cosenza.

  It was an exciting time to follow the team, which now had a tidy midfielder called Donato Be
rgamini. From Ferrara, in the North, he was nicknamed ‘Denis’. He was good-looking, with blond hair, deep-set eyes and a determined stare. He was only twenty-two when he arrived in the deep South, and in many ways he seemed a lot more innocent than his teammates. The fact that he didn’t know how to play cards was just one example of his unworldliness. He described himself as schivo (‘shy’). He had no hobbies other than football and fast cars. As a player he was the sort of tidy grafter a coach often appreciates as much as the fans.

  It was a tight-knit and efficient team. Alberto Urban was an attacking midfielder with whom the coach, Franco Liguori, had worked at Cavese. The goalkeeper was a big youngster called Luigi Simoni. The team had a charismatic, fast-living attacker called Michele Padovano. ‘Padovano, score for us,’ the ultras sang to the tune of Bob Marley’s ‘Buffalo Soldier’.

  In thirty-four league matches during the season, Cosenza kept twenty-two clean sheets. Not that they scored a huge number of goals either. There were three draws in a row in December and January, then, later that spring, another four successive nil–nils. But there was something almost inevitable about that season. Ever since that first fixture, when Cosenza had won 2–1 at Cagliari and the ultras had held up a banner saying ‘Cosenza Rise Again for Us’, there was a feeling that this might be the year that the team, after twenty-three lean years, would get promoted back to Serie B.

  Towards the end of the season, on 17 April 1988, Cosenza was away at Salernitana. For years, the rival ultras of both cities had fought furious battles, and the Cosenza players were escorted to the ground by police. There were brawls between ultras, and the game itself was dirty. Cosenza players were hacked down, scythed from behind, elbowed in the face. Then it all changed. From a long free kick, from well inside the Cosenza half, the ball bounced twice and suddenly Padovano was in on goal. He smacked it past the keeper with his left. More fights broke out immediately, even in the press box. The atmosphere was so tense that the ecstatic Cosenza commentator, Federico Bria, had to whisper into his radio microphone. ‘Cosenza has scored. Excuse me if I don’t shout but the situation here is a little bit ugly. You can exult,’ he said as quietly as possible. ‘Padovano has scored in the twenty-fifth minute of the first half.’ Cosenza held on to win the game 1–0.

  After all those no-score-draws, Cosenza won six out of its last nine games. The momentum and excitement grew with every victory. The last home game of that season was against Nocerina. Red-and-blue banners were hung between the narrow lanes of the centro storico. Cars and garage doors were painted red-and-blue, while balconies were draped in the same colours. Cars drove around with speakers on the roof, honking incessantly. ‘Forza Lupi’ – ‘Come on, Wolves’ – was written on scarves and bedsheets. Any flags that had the same colours as Cosenza were good enough: the Norwegian flag, the Confederacy’s stars-and-bars.

  At the game, the stadium announcer was so drowned out that he had to start reading the formations from the top again and again. There was no players’ tunnel back then so the teams walked onto the pitch from a dense mass of physios, subs and journalists on the flat grass at the far side of the pitch, as if they had just strolled in from the car park. Red-and-blue smoke flares rendered half the crowd briefly invisible. ‘Never again prisoners of a dream’, said the banner.

  The game was an easy enough 2–0 victory for Cosenza. Alberto Urban scored from a cut-back and then Maurizio Lucchetti smashed home a powerful lob from outside the area. But it wasn’t enough. Other results meant that the team still needed one more point for promotion to Serie B.

  The last game of the season was on 5 June 1988 at Monopoli, on the Adriatic coast between Bari and Lecce. Eight thousand Cosentini went along. It was a red-and-blue invasion. Someone opened a gate onto the pitch and the Cosenza ultras stole banners, taking some home but immediately burning others. The start of the game was delayed and Padre Fedele had to go on the loudspeaker to plead with the crowd to calm down. The game ended in a draw, and Cosenza was finally promoted.

  Fans ran onto the pitch and hugged the players. Everyone had to dodge vases and plates that the locals threw at the celebrating fans as they walked back to their cars and the train station. One man walked into a shop and joined the train back to Calabria holding an entire cash till. The celebrations continued all that summer. Cosenza was, by its standards at least, back in the big time.

  *

  At Inter (the other team in Milano), Paolo ‘the Armourer’ had created a new ultra group called Skins. Their joy in bloodshed took fights to a new low. In October 1988 an Ascoli fan had been beaten to death a week before his wedding. The Skins were the first to imagine that they were insulting their Milanista enemies by writing on a banner ‘Milanisti Jews – same race – same end’. Something eerily familiar was happening. The inebriated hatred reminded observers that the far right had never really gone away. Teasing and taunting had, over the years, turned into overt antisemitism and racism.

  But the more scandalized the media, the more publicity these groups received. In July 1989 Udinese (in Friuli, in the far northeast of the country) was on the verge of signing the Israeli midfielder Ronny Rosenthal from Standard Liege. But that summer the city’s walls were spray-painted with antisemitic slogans by various ultras: ‘Rosenthal Go Home’ and ‘Jews out of Friuli’. Wary of going against its own ultras, the club decided not to sign him. (Within a few months, he was playing for Liverpool, scoring a hat-trick against Charlton Athletic and winning the league title).

  28 January 1989

  The postal van travelled the same route each week through the rice-growing plains halfway between Turin and Milano. It journeyed north up the provincial road 594, which ran parallel to the Sesia river, taking cheques and cash up to the rural post offices in Gattinara, Borgosesia and Varallo. The vehicle always had a Carabiniere escort travelling behind.

  It was still dark and foggy when, shortly after 6 a.m., a white Fiat Golf with Turin plates drew alongside the two-vehicle convoy. The Fiat Golf had been stolen two days before by the Drugo Pino Coldheart, one of three masked men in the car. Before the Carabinieri realized what was happening, a pump action Franchi shotgun had shot out two tyres and their car was in the ditch. They radioed for support.

  With the escort out of the way, the Golf revved after the postal van. Two shots were fired into the air and the driver of the van pulled over. He and his colleague were bound with rubber strips. Duct tape was placed over their eyes. They were roughly shoved into the back of the Golf. The three men took off their masks. Pino took the wheel of the hijacked van and sped off in the dark with the Golf behind. The vehicles turned left and left again, so that they were heading south. Within minutes they came to the dirt track near the Cavour canal in Greggio where, the night before, the three men had hidden an off-road Toyota and a Peugeot 405.

  Two early-morning hunters saw what happened next. The three men started cutting open the postal bags, one cutting his hand badly and swearing. In one of those bags were various jute sacks with cash and cheques. The man with the cut hand threw them in the back of the Peugeot and the men drove off. The hunters went and raised the alarm.

  The armed robbers were tense now. Pino was in the Peugeot with Alessandro; Maurizio was behind driving the Toyota. All three had pistols down the side of their seats. They could already see one or two anglers along the canals and rivers, and knew that the police and Carabinieri would have sent search vehicles to the countryside around Vercelli.

  They were on the road north to San Giacomo Vercellese when a road block stopped them. The Carabinieri were immediately suspicious of the two cars containing three men, driving fast at dawn. But when they approached the vehicles, they saw that two of the three suspects were colleagues: Maurizio Incaudo and Alessandro Chieppa were both Carabinieri. Antonio Scino, one of the on-duty Carabinieri, noticed that Alessandro’s hand was bleeding.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Salvatore Vinci asked his colleague, Maurizio. As he posed the question, he looked inside the Toyota.
‘You know there’s been a robbery?’

  The first shot knocked Vinci to the ground. He was hit in the abdomen but returned fire. Maurizio Incaudo got out of the car and fired again, at point blank range. Further up the road, Pino and Alessandro were firing at the other Carabiniere, who was now running into the rice-fields, returning fire as he splashed and screamed, the bullets creating geysers all around him.

  Scino didn’t see the cars speed off, but the shots had stopped. He couldn’t hear anything except the thudding of his own blood. He stood up in the rice-field and only now did he realize how cold the water was. He waded up the bank. ‘Salvatò’, he shouted, looking for his colleague. ‘Salvatò.’ Then, as he ran, dripping, along the road, he saw the crimson clothes and lifeless body of his colleague.

  By then, the two cars were a few kilometres north, in Ravasenda. They had found an old military warehouse in the woods and had forced the lock. Inside, they counted the money. It came to just over 200 million lire. They sat on the ground, reliving what had happened, the excitement soon giving way to anxiety. They waited for a few hours, arguing about what to do next. Maurizio Incaudo was shaking and weeping. ‘I’m fucked up,’ he repeated. He wasn’t only a Carabiniere himself, but was the son of a Carabiniere, and he had killed one of his own. ‘It’s all fucked up,’ he kept saying.

  He told the others he was going to end his life and went up to the first floor of the warehouse. The other two, Pino and Alessandro, joined him there when they heard cars approaching. There were helicopters overhead too. The only way out was to jump from the back window, a drop of 20 feet. They urged Maurizio to join them but he refused. As they ran off into the woods, they heard a shot. Maurizio had taken his own life.

  The other two were picked up later that night. Like Maurizio Incaudo, one was also a Carabiniere. The other was twenty-six and already had a colourful curriculum vitae. Expelled from a police academy in Trieste in 1982 for violence, he had been arrested repeatedly for affray and GBH. He had attacked Inter fans and Carabinieri and was, until his arrest, the leader of Juventus’s top ultra group, the Drughi.