Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  As we’re walking out of the ground, there is a T-shirt in front of us that says in dialect: ‘Tu insisti, io persisto, u vu capì ca risistu!’ ‘You insist, I persist, don’t you understand that I resist!’

  PART TWO

  7 July 2016, Stura di Demonte

  Ciccio Bucci pulled his Jeep Renegade onto the hard shoulder of the viaduct. The dual carriageway here was forty-five metres above the flood plain of the Stura di Demonte river. It was known as the ‘viaduct of suicides’. This was where Edoardo, only son of Gianni Agnelli (the late owner of Fiat and Juventus), ended his life in 2000.

  Bucci had always been obsessed with Juventus. Born in 1976, the oldest of three boys, he had grown up in San Severo, an ancient trading town in Puglia, on the spur of the Italian boot. He had spent his childhood watching the greats of Juventus – Michel Platini, Roberto Baggio, Fabrizio Ravanelli and Gianluca Vialli – and had been hypnotized by the black-and-white stripes of the club. They seemed, somehow, a symbol of the efficiency and decisiveness of the North, of a world where there were more than just shades of grey. Bucci had become an obsessive supporter.

  He took off his trademark shades and rubbed his face. Below his gelled black hair, his right eye was heavily bruised and his forehead was cut. His throat still hurt and he massaged it with his fingers to test the pain. He tried to think how he had got here, so far from home and so close to the end. Things hadn’t been the same since his mother had died. She had always believed in him and with her gone, he had lost his self-belief.

  He looked at the swank inside of the Jeep. Jeep was Juventus’s sponsor and he was working for the club he loved. He kept telling friends that, for the first time in his life, he was ‘official’. The club had given him this chunky car as part of his role as an SLO, a ‘supporter liaison officer’ (even though, officially, he was an employee of a security company called Telecontrol). He was a go-between, trying to smooth out issues between the club and its intransigent ultras. That was why his dream job had turned sour. You couldn’t win. He was always being threatened and, like last night, beaten up.

  Bucci got out of the car and took in the view. In the distance he could see the first of the mighty mountains of the Alps. In the foreground were rectangles of industrial units and corn fields. Somewhere there was Beinette, the village where he had once lived with Gabriella, his ex, and their son Fabio. He had just been back there to water her plants as she was on holiday.

  Fabio, his son, was the only thing he loved more than Juventus. That thought started the tears. Bucci felt he had to do this to make Fabio safe, to keep the thugs away from his family. There was nothing else he could do now. Everything was inevitable and logical. He heard a couple of workmen shouting at him as he climbed over the metal railing. He stood on the other side. Only his heels could fit on the edge and his knees were bent by the bulging railing. He looked up to the sky, then down to the concrete and scrub below. He closed his eyes, thinking of his mother and of Fabio, and stepped off.

  Present Day: Cosenza v. Verona

  It was Cosenza’s first home game in Serie B. As luck would have it, it was against the team that, apart from Catanzaro, their ultras hated more than any other: Hellas Verona. Almost thirty years ago, the Cosentini had held up a famous banner deriding the Veronesi: ‘The culture of our land against the stupidity of your minds. Verona is first only for heroin.’ The differences were largely cultural. The Northern city was nationalistic to put it lightly, whereas the Cosentini were so anti-nationalist that they chanted ‘Zaire’ after the African country had beaten Italy 4–0 in the Seoul Olympics in 1988. All manner of flags are present in the Cosenza stadium, but never the Italian tricolour. Another famous Cosenza banner, held up to Verona fans, said simply: ‘Get the Nazis out of the Terraces’.

  But nothing in Italian football is simple. The San Vito stadium had been used for concerts through the summer, and then in the hours before the game there was heavy rain. When the pitch was inspected the turf peeled off as easily as skin from an onion. Cosenza had waited decades to face Verona in Serie B and now the match was called off. Verona was awarded a 3–0 victory by the bureaucrats of Italian football.

  That was the least of the problems for Serie B at the start of the season. During the summer three teams from the division – Cesena, Bari and Avellino – had gone bankrupt, meaning that there were now only nineteen teams left. Everyone knows that a division has to have an even number of competitors so that each has a match to play. But it was impossible to ascertain who should take those three vacant places: those who had been relegated from Serie B the previous season, or the teams who had missed out on promotion from the three Serie Cs? Trying to make that decision when the season was already underway was a bit like trying to replace a puncture when you’re already riding the bicycle. One team, Entella, even found itself without a league. Having hoped to have its relegation rescinded, it was excluded from Serie C but then not admitted to Serie B, meaning that it was in limbo. A former foreign minister, Franco Frattini (who was by then the President of the Collegio di Garanzia per lo Sport, the country’s top sporting tribunal), said, ‘It’s easier to organize a G7 summit than Serie B.’

  Something very similar happens every summer in Italian football. There’s uncertainty about which division many teams will play in. There’s even confusion, often, about how many teams a league will have, since the numbers constantly change. That chaos is partly the result of the fact that, given the understandable desperation for justice, there are many levels of sporting tribunals. There’s an almost pathological inability to take a binding decision and uncertainty drifts into the autumn. The same happens in ultras’ legal trials. You never hear them say that they were found guilty or innocent. Instead they’ll list their trials (for the same crime) like results in the football season: ‘I won, then lost, then won again.’

  The bigger teams are usually bounced up the leagues at the expense of the smaller ones. The effect all these shenanigans have on the ultras is intriguing. It gives them a role in the summer, as they threaten protests or public disorder. But it also gives cachet to their rhetoric that modern football is corrupt and that they – far from being the evil of the sport – are the guardians of its soul.

  Early 1990s: Diabolik

  ‘I realized watching the [1990] World Cup,’ wrote Grit in his memoir, Anni Buttati (‘wasted years’), ‘that football was changing and was becoming a way to publicize oneself.’ Being a graphic designer, Grit was clever at creating eye-catching choreographies. Lazio’s Irriducibili were even noticed when they weren’t there. In the first season after that World Cup, the Irriducibili led a fan’s strike for the first half of every match, leaving only a banner in the empty stand saying ‘12th man on the pitch only when we want’. It was a way of urging the club not to take them for granted. Another display – ‘prisoners of a faith’ with the lettering behind bars – identified the ultras with prisoners of conscience.

  The group also had a brilliant artist, nicknamed Disegnello (‘the little designer’). And so, much as the Irriducibili criticized the spectacularization of the sport through television, they were also the beneficiaries of it. Banners were no longer just strips of cloth but flags that covered the entirety of the terrace, one quarter of the stadium. The more pharaonic the display, the more likely that the group and its message would be picked up by TV cameras and, in later years, the internet.

  It was a world that was becoming increasingly self-conscious about appearances. All rebellions are acts of style as well as substance, and the ultras had always been poseurs. The Lazio ultras, in particular, prided themselves on their stylishness. ‘Dress well, behave badly’ was one of their mottoes. But now the fixation on appearances was almost pathologically self-reflexive. One member of the Irriducibili in the early 1990s remembers selling photographs of the terraces to individual ultras on match days to fund the next choreography, which would then be photographed and the images sold and so on.

  Gone was the spontaneity of th
e 1970s, with all its revelry in individual expression. Now one dominant group would obscure your view of the pitch in order that thousands of square metres of material could briefly be beamed into living rooms around the world. The uniformity was acoustic as well as visual. At the start of the 1991 season the Irriducibili had erected four huge speakers on the Curva Nord and now one man with a microphone could make more noise than thousands of unamplified individuals. The Irriducibili bosses called it ‘coerenza’ – ‘consistency’ – but to many insurgents on the terraces it seemed creepily totalitarian.

  Most importantly, as the terraces’ displays became more grandiose, so the need for income streams increased. The costs of a one-off choreography were increasing and it was perhaps inevitable that ultra groups started looking for innovative ways to meet those costs. Every match day the terraces became like an open-air souk and the money paid not just for gargantuan displays, but also for the legal expenses of an ultra on trial, for their family if in prison, and for the rent of a group’s HQ.

  The marketplace in Lazio’s Curva Nord was particularly busy. It was partly because in the early 1990s football suddenly became fashionable amongst not just the masses, but also the monied. Fans on the terraces had disposable income and Lazio was, for once, considered cool. The club had a new owner, the food entrepreneur Sergio Cragnotti, and he had invested in Paul Gascoigne and Beppe Signori. Signori, a diminutive striker who barely seemed to fill his shirt, consistently scored spectacular goals. For the first time in almost two decades, it was exciting to be a Lazio supporter, and in a world of chromatic conformism, it was hard for supply to keep up with demand for the white-and-light-blue of Lazio. Club merchandising is notoriously weak in Italy (it’s often hard to find any official strip), and the Eagles group, after plenty of scraps with the Irriducibili, had folded in 1992. The Irriducibili now had a near monopoly on merchandise and, in that huge terrace, thousands of customers.

  There was a young man in Grit’s ever-growing band called Fabrizio Piscitelli. He was nicknamed Diabolik after the cartoon character thief and assassin. Diabolik looked a bit like Quentin Tarantino, with a big chin and an unsettling grin. He invariably wore a baseball cap and rimless glasses or shades. He was an avid drugs-user but his main high came from fighting, which, he said, made him ‘feel alive in a world of the dead’.

  He especially liked fighting the police. ‘You feel even more alive when you fight the guards,’ he once said. ‘You know from the outset that they’re stronger than you, when you are armed only with a belt, and they’re armed from head to toe. But when they try and come on the terrace, and everyone runs away and only twenty madmen remain to take them on, without fear in front of security cameras, knowing that only one of you will be left standing… that’s like playing football for us.’ Diabolik could be pally or brutal, depending on the situation. ‘For the good of Lazio we were looking to injure people on the other side, for the good of Lazio we wanted to go onto the terraces and kill them. We wanted to show how much we were prepared to do for Lazio, with blood.’

  But Diabolik had a good head for figures too. With a friend, Toffolo, he had crunched the numbers. Friends of friends introduced Diabolik to various contacts in Naples. He started meeting men who called themselves ‘textile merchants’ – businessmen trading in counterfeit shirts and scarves that they imported from Asia. The mark-up, he realized, could be huge. The difference between the purchase and sales price was between thirty and sixty thousand lire (roughly £10–20). On a match day Diabolik reckoned he could shift a few hundred units in half an hour, probably a few thousand week-to-week. And shirts and scarves was just one of the possible income streams. His friends in Naples, the Senese family, had other, less legal products on offer if Diabolik was willing to shift them as well.

  Nobody knows exactly how Grit was forced out of the iconic group he had founded. One Lazio ultra told me simply that Diabolik and his mates were ‘a Rotary Club of evil’. One senses, speaking to him, that Grit still yearns to be an ‘ex officio’ member of the gang. He refuses to divulge what happened for fear of riling his replacements. But by the mid-1990s Diabolik had taken charge of Lazio’s Curva Nord and was soon living up to his nickname.

  12 September 1993, Cosenza

  Even in Cosenza, where Padre Fedele had fought for pacificism, there had been an escalation in violence with other fan groups. In one Lecce–Cosenza game, on 14 March 1993, homemade hand grenades had been thrown and one Lecce fan lost his hand. Another Lecce fan threw one of the bombs back and it exploded next to the foot of a Cosentino, whose mobility was so diminished that he later took his own life. In that violent match, Padre Fedele was waving his hands up and down, furiously shouting at his boys to stop being stupid.

  But everyone, it seemed, had lost control. Someone lost an eye when a lighter was thrown in a Brescia game… another broke his leg jumping from the top ring of Verona’s Bentegodi stadium, where he had gone to rescue a 50-metre banner saying ‘Come On Wolves’. Surrounded by Veronese skinheads, he had to jump onto the concrete steps far below. From above, the Veronese showered him with flares and urine and so the Cosentini had ripped up the seats and used them as frisbees, aiming at those Aryan thugs.

  Even between the Cosenza crews there were arguments. It came to a head on 12 September 1993, in a game that should have been remembered for Pietro Maiellaro’s Maradona-like dribble, running around half a team and half a pitch before scoring for Cosenza. But on the terraces there was a furious brawl between rival ultra crews from Cosenza. There were as many reasons for the fight as there were people involved. Some said it was part of a turf war between rival criminal clans. Others said it was about personality clashes and leadership. But that was the day that the unity of the Cosenza curva ended. As ultras often do when they’ve attracted the wrong attention, the groups went quiet. The Nuclei Sconvolti dissolved. ‘All guilty,’ said one banner at the next game, ‘all in silence.’ The Amantea group held up a banner announcing that it was going to snooze: ‘Amantea S’Abbiocca.’

  By then Padre Fedele was becoming something of a star in the Italian media. He had gone to Messina, in Sicily, to study medicine and had his own slot on a TV show. Every Christmas he put up a tent in the main square, as he had in Cosenza, to gather funds for his charitable trips to Africa. He organized twinnings between Cosenza and other teams that hadn’t been sanctioned by Cosenza ultras. He was trying to bring people together who, perhaps, didn’t want to be. He tried to unite the supporters clubs with ultra groups. A biography, written by Paride, was published.

  Then, at a conference in Lecco against stadium violence, Padre Fedele had met a porn star called Luana Borgia. There was an immediate chemistry between them. They both craved the limelight and were curious about the other’s extreme life choices. Over the next few months a flirtatious dance began as they tried to bring the other round to their position: carnal libertinism or the confession of Christ, or maybe both at once.

  The two were spotted in the stadium together, which only increased the gossip. Always a volcanic fundraiser, brow-beating sinners into putting cash in his coffers, Padre Fedele hung out at Bologna’s ‘erotica fair’ next to Borgia. (She said they raised enough to finance an ambulance and an operating theatre in Rwanda.) For rival ultras, the target was too good to miss. The Fiorentina ultras dedicated a banner to Padre Fedele, complete with an erotic drawing: ‘Padre Fedele, Faith divides us. Desire unites us.’

  The Monk had always been unmonkish – he could shout and swear as well as anyone – and he had often joked about how red-blooded he was. He wasn’t pious, but a commoner. As if to underline that comparison, he had once quipped while holding the knots that represented his vows: ‘These two [poverty and obedience] are knotted tight, but this one [celibacy] is coming loose.’ The ultras weren’t moralists and didn’t really care if a man who had been so loving was, occasionally, loved in return. It might make him a bad monk but to the largely atheist ultras it definitely didn’t make him a bad man. But Paride and Luca
were alarmed. By then Padre Fedele’s convent had become a precious place of cultural insurgency. There was a walk-in surgery, the soup kitchen and rooms for the homeless, for the impoverished and, increasingly, for immigrants. The ultras held their weekly meetings there, paying 300,000 lire a month (just shy of a hundred pounds) for the space. It was an exciting ferment of new initiatives and ideas, and Paride and Luca were concerned that Padre Fedele was playing with fire. His flirtation with a lusty woman wasn’t the problem. It was more that he was so vocal about injustice that he had made enemies who could use his weaknesses to bring down not just him, the revolutionary Monk, but the whole countercultural movement that surrounded him.