by Tobias Jones
The Guardia di Finanza were constantly on their case, checking on bank balances and sub-contracts. But they found nothing amiss. Scotto was simply doing what he said he was doing. As the head of Ikea said of the ultras, who worked as delivery men also putting the furniture together, ‘They’ve always shown simplicity, humility and responsibility.’
Part of the cooperative’s strength was that oldest weapon of the ultras: force of numbers. When the legendary singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André’s guitar was auctioned to raise money for the medical charity, Emergency, Mario Tullo put in a call to the ultras. Within a few hours 8 million lire had been raised. They raised a further 50 million when a hospital needed medical equipment. ‘It’s important to consider young ultras,’ said Tullo, ‘not as a mass of delinquents but as lads who are living in a particularly uneasy situation, and to begin a dialogue with them and, in the case of the cooperative, help them to grow through a project.’ It wasn’t rocket science. As Luca, from Cosenza, says: ‘People want to do good. All you need to do is put them together.’
4 June 1989, Milan
Many of the Roma ultras had taken the overnight train. At the first few stops they hung out of the windows singing, banging on the metal exterior and waving flags. The carriages were full of dope smoke and happy shouting. Other than yellow-and-red everywhere, there was a lot of light denim and curly mullets.
Antonio De Falchi loved these away games. He was a quiet lad of eighteen and often used his long, straight hair as a curtain against the world. He was such a gentle kid that he once went to a game without his belt so that the police wouldn’t hassle him, and his mates teased him as he held up his trousers with one hand. He was loosely part of a group called Impero Continua, the ‘On-Going Empire’. The exuberance of away days made him feel less timid, like he had a gang around him at last and permission to be noisy.
Part of his quietness was the confusion of grief. His father had committed suicide three years before and he still couldn’t understand it. That was another reason he loved these trips: the chance to be with men who seemed so noisy and strong. He was the youngest of eight children growing up in Torre Maura, a suburb in the far southeast of the city just inside the ring road. His most precious possessions were his moped and the shirt that Sebino Nela, the great Roma defender, had thrown him after a game at Cremona back in April.
The train arrived in Milan at half-past eight the following morning. There was more singing and flag-waving but Antonio peeled off with three of his mates. He wanted to see the city a bit and to buy postcards. It must have felt, to Antonio, like an efficient city: clean but oddly cold. The boys hid their scarves as they wandered around. Everywhere they saw the blue-and-black of Inter, since Giovanni Trapattoni’s team had won the scudetto that year with great players like Lothar Matthäus, Aldo Serena and Walter Zenga. The red-and-black of Milan, too, was in every other bar and shop. Just eleven days before that Sunday, they had won the European Cup 4–0 with Carlo Ancelotti in midfield and two goals apiece from Ruud Gullit and Marco Van Basten.
At midday Antonio and his friends wandered towards the stadium to buy their tickets. The San Siro was a building site. Like many other Italian stadiums, it was being enlarged for the World Cup, which was to be held in Italy the following year. The boys were in front of Gate 16 when a man came up to them and asked for a cigarette. Then he asked for the time. It was an old tactic to tell if someone had the wrong accent. One of the boys tried to fake a Milanese accent but it didn’t wash. The Milanista whistled and motioned to his friends to run over. It was an ambush. Antonio and his mates sprinted away but a kick caught his heels and he fell over. He took more kicks and punches on the ground but the police were quickly there. Antonio tried to get up but fell to the ground again. He was struggling to breathe and then wasn’t breathing at all. One of the policemen tried to resuscitate him but he died there, in the shadow of the stadium.
The three men arrested for Antonio De Falchi’s death were all from the Gruppo Brasato (‘the Braised Group’, maybe so named because they were stewed in alcohol; their symbol was a Halloween pumpkin holding an axe and a tin of beer). One of the men was even part of Milan’s official security detail. At the trial, two of the three were acquitted and, on appeal, the third was also acquitted. De Falchi, the defence said, had a heart defect which affected the oxygenation of the blood and made him appear cyanosed (meaning blueish, rather than pinkish, skin). It was another crime without punishment.
For Romanisti, De Falchi became a martyr, a name to be sprayed on city walls as a reminder of his sacrifice for the cause. One famous banner, addressed to Roma players, said: ‘Antonio died for that shirt. Honour it.’ In the 2003–04 season an ultra group was formed in his honour, Brigata De Falchi. But for the other side, it was a death to be turned into a taunt. The Italian for a heart attack is a ‘heart arrest’, so when Milan next played Rome, the Milan ultras unfurled a banner saying, ‘Your arrest is of the heart’.
A few days later a train was taking Bologna fans to Florence for the so-called ‘Derby of the Apennines’. Ivan Dell’Olio had just turned fourteen. It was his first away game. The train had stopped at a station, Rifredi, when ultras from Fiorentina began throwing stones at it. One of the ultras had a Molotov cocktail that he hurled through an open carriage window. The flames spread everywhere, rising up from the puddle of fuel and engulfing the carriage. Dell’Olio survived but suffered 75 per cent burns. In Genova, Scotto put an extra thousand lire onto the price of the ticket (worth about 80 pence in 1989) and sent the funds to Dell’Olio’s family.
One Bologna fan, Armando, said, ‘That’s when we understood the game was finished. There had always been a violence similar to courtyard wars. It had been a game with roles, you had an enemy and you took his scarves. But this was something more serious. People were crying, people were annihilated. You felt that that episode had killed your innocence.’
18 November 1989, Cosenza
During its first season back in Serie B, Cosenza nearly made it into Serie A, finishing in sixth place. The ultras were now on the national stage – going to big cities in the North like Udine, Brescia and Genova – but they still most relished going up against their hated rivals, Catanzaro.
That winter the team’s quietly efficient midfielder, Denis Bergamini, broke his fibula in training and missed the rest of the season. By then Bergamini looked older than the innocent, blond boy from the North who joined Cosenza aged twenty-two. He hair was cut much shorter on top and he had a mini-mullet behind. He was still good-looking but he had lived a bit.
In the summer of 1989 the club had hired a new coach, Gigi Simoni, and invested in a Calabrian attacker who would become a club legend, Gigi Marulla. There were high hopes that this season the club could go one better and actually reach the promised land of Serie A. But after a dozen games Cosenza found itself penultimate in the league table. The Lupi had drawn seven games, lost four and won only once. Their next game was at home to Messina, and the team was staying in the usual Motel Agip in Rende, a suburb of the city.
At training that morning, Bergamini seemed fired up. ‘We have to win,’ he urged his colleagues. ‘We have to get out of this wretched position in the league.’ He was sufficiently light-hearted, though, to play a trick on one of the players, cutting off the ends of his woollen socks. When Simoni, the coach, invited everyone to a post-match barbeque at his house, Bergamini said to everyone that it would be a celebration of their victory.
After training that morning Bergamini rushed off. Nobody knew where he was going. He was back for lunch with the rest of the team at 12.30, then slept in the room that he shared with Michele Padovano until around three. He then drove in his Maserati to the Garden Cinema in the city, where he was due to watch a film with teammates. During the screening he asked his friend, the team masseur, where the toilet was and left his seat.
From having been a carefree young man, Bergamini now seemed weighed down by worries. His injury that January hadn’t helped. It was the
first serious stoppage of his career, and for someone who had few interests outside football, he was clearly bored. He was also pensive: he had arranged for his on-off girlfriend to go to London for an abortion, and he worried that her traditionalist family would be infuriated if they found out.
But there was something that his family didn’t understand about his behaviour. That summer Bergamini had been on the brink of joining Parma, much closer to his home in Emilia-Romagna. Despite the deal being seemingly done, he had received a call from Calabria and suddenly cancelled everything. It appeared to his family that he was under some mysterious pressure from down South, as if he were being controlled in some way. ‘I even thought that he was being blackmailed,’ his father said years later.
On the Monday before that Messina game, Bergamini received another phone call, at his parents’ house, after which they saw him red-faced and sweating profusely. Bergamini even confided to an ex-girlfriend that someone in Cosenza intended to harm him. When she laughed it off he became very angry – the only time, she said, he had ever lost his temper with her. The Friday before the match, when he was in his hotel room that afternoon, another phone call had clearly spooked him. Afterwards he was, according to his room-mate Michele Padovano, ‘extremely worried, he was scared’.
It’s probable that Bergamini was slowly learning what a dirty game football could be. As Padovano (who would go on to play for Juventus and also spend time in jail) once said: ‘In football the cleanest person has scabies.’ It is highly likely that Bergamini’s salary was being topped up in cash. He had bought his Maserati for far more money than he had withdrawn from his account but that didn’t surprise anyone. Back in the 1980s, cash was the main currency in the shadowy world of Calabrian football.
Match-fixing had always dogged Italian football, and to cynics it seemed odd that a team that had performed so well last year was now losing so many games, despite reinforcements like the big-hearted Marulla and Berga’s return to fitness. Years later one player admitted that games were being chucked. Only a handful of players were involved but Bergamini was allegedly furious with their attitude and led the opposition to the scam, screaming at teammates during games and presumably berating them, too, in the changing rooms. Bergamini’s father was so disgusted by what he saw in the last game his son ever played, a 1–1 draw at Monza, that he said he would never watch the team again. ‘This is the last time I’m coming to watch Cosenza because you played shamefully,’ he told his son. A theory emerged that young women had been used to befriend players, providing them with carnal fun and cash in return for throwing the odd game. It was a sordid theory but it didn’t seem improbable.
That evening before the Messina game, Bergamini – normally the most punctual in the team – didn’t arrive for dinner in the hotel. At 7.30 p.m., when the team was sat at table, a phone call arrived for Gigi Simoni, the manager. At first the receptionist didn’t interrupt the meal, because those were orders, but the phone rang again. On the other end was the same young girl called Isabella. She said that she was Bergamini’s girlfriend and that Denis had just committed suicide by throwing himself under a lorry. The manager thought it was a bad joke so the girl passed the phone to a man ‘with a rueful voice’ who confirmed the story.
Nothing about the suicide added up. Denis’s family were convinced he had been murdered. ‘I felt,’ his father said, ‘that they had killed him.’ None of the players believed in the suicide either. Denis’s room-mate and best friend used identical words to his father. ‘They’ve killed him,’ said Michele Padovano. ‘There’s no other logical explanation.’
Isabella Internò – the young girl with whom Bergamini had had a torrid, on-off relationship – claimed he was fed up with football and wanted to escape to the Amazon or Hawaii. That was why they were driving to Taranto’s port. But Bergamini didn’t have a passport and his allegedly suicidal thoughts didn’t match the determination he had shown just that morning in training. In his last interview he had even said, ‘I like living.’
Internò alleged that she and Bergamini had spoken for a long time on a muddy plateau by the side of the main road, and that he had then thrown himself in front of a lorry as if ‘diving into a swimming pool’. His body was apparently dragged a long way before the truck came to a halt.
As the team’s unofficial chaplain, Padre Fedele went to the morgue. He took along Drainpipe, one of the leaders of the Cosenza ultras, who remembers the shock of seeing the hero of the Cosenza midfield laid out on the zinc. The shock wasn’t only at the dead body but at the state of him. ‘They said he had been dragged along the ground by a lorry for seventy metres,’ Drainpipe remembers, ‘but his face was clean, not a scratch on it.’ There were no grazes or abrasions on Bergamini’s body. His watch was intact, his gold necklace unscratched, his face unmarked. Not even his shoes showed signs of the impact or of the muddy lay-by. ‘We never had any doubt that he had been killed,’ says Drainpipe. Nor did Bergamini’s family. ‘Nobody,’ Donata Bergamini, his sister, told me, ‘ever believed that version of events.’
For the ultras it was an unprecedented bereavement. Fans of many teams had mourned the loss of players in the past but rarely had they ever had to fight, along with that player’s family, to prove that one had been murdered. The fact that it was Bergamini, too, made the grief particularly acute. During his convalescence from injury he had often stood in the stands with the Cosenza ultras, enjoying their unruly chaos.
‘It was they,’ says Donata, ‘who immediately after the killing of my brother continued to shout his name and to wave a flag with his face on it. They had so much anger inside about what had happened to Denis.’
‘Something just broke the day they whacked Denis,’ one ultra told me. ‘Our trust in the whole football fairy-tale was over. Something we loved was snatched away, not just Denis, but our belief that what we were watching, what we were being told, was in any way trustworthy.’ Being an ultra had always been about never accepting bullshit from above, and for the hardcore on the Cosenza curva ‘that was a moment that we, as a group of a few hundred, knew we were being lied to. It stank.’
As weeks went by, questions around the suicide story only increased. It emerged from subsequent witness statements that Isabella Internò had met one player, Francesco Marino, before Bergamini’s death and phoned him afterwards. No explanation was ever given for that contact. She was in a relationship with a policeman, who she later married. Others alleged that there were links between the top echelons of the club and organized criminals, since one club official had married the sister of a crime boss.
Then, at the very end of that dark season, something happened which – to the conspiracy-theorist ultras – only confirmed that there was a cover-up. Two men who were at the bottom of the club ladder – they were fixers who helped with the kit, the travel arrangements and the bookings – contacted the Bergamini family. One, Domenico Corrente, delivered Bergamini’s shoes to his father, possibly as a humane gesture since the player’s clothing had been so hastily incinerated, or maybe to underline to the family how improbable the suicide story was. The other fixer, Alfredo Rende, promised Bergamini’s father that at the end of the season he would come and talk to him, to give him additional information about the death of his son.
After the last game of that fateful 1989–90 season – in Trieste (another nil–nil draw which aroused suspicions, since both teams needed just a point to be safe) – Corrente and Rende were travelling back to Cosenza in an Alfa 75. It was only as they approached Cosenza, after driving 950 kilometres, that the accident happened. It was on the same stretch of road where Bergamini had died, on the Statale 106 Jonica. The car flew into the opposite carriageway where it was hit by a lorry. Both men in the car died instantly.
Present Day, Sud-Tirol
After that victory against Sambenettese, Cosenza’s opponents in the semi-finals of the play-off hailed from the south Tyrol, in the far north of country. It feels (and often is) very Austrian. The residents speak Ita
lian with a Germanic accent. They live in pine chalets with low, well-ordered log-piles stretching the length of the houses. The team in Bolzano even has a Germanic name: Fussball Südtirol.
The first game of the two-legged tie was in the north. Not many ultras made the 1,134-kilometre journey, and just as well. Although the Lupi played well, opening up the home defence on frequent occasions, they never found the back of the net. Shots flew wide, were blocked or skewed high. Frequently, a Cosenza shot rebounded off the advertising hoardings and bulged the net from behind, convincing the distant fans that a goal had been scored.
But in the ninety-first minute, a local lad – substitute Michael Cia – saw his first shot bounce back to him and he swung his right leg, smashing the ball into the net. A team that had hardly threatened for an hour and a half suddenly stole the game, 1–0. The next day the Cosenza press called the result beffa acerba, a ‘sour mockery’.
The return game was only a few days later, on 10 June. The teams came out as the Cosenza fans were singing along to what had become their anthem, that old Bahamian folk song made popular by the Beach Boys, ‘Sloop John B’ (as reimagined by a Cosenza punk band, Lumpen) – ‘I feel so broken, I want to go home.’ The match was similar to the first leg. Almost from the start, Südtirol were defending their narrow lead. Cosenza were piling on the pressure but the tall, blond defenders from the North were solid. But then, halfway through the second half, in the twenty-fourth minute, the Cosenza player Alain Baclet dived onto a free kick and guided the ball the far side of the keeper. The tie was now level but the momentum was all with the home team. The injustice of that first leg was going to be avenged. In the ninety-fourth minute, a Südtirol defender rose to head away a corner but the ball skimmed off the top of his head and into the goal. The place went berserk. After all the hugging and shouting, many tough ultras sat down, for the first time all match, and wept. Cosenza was going to the final of Serie C.
