Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  The distance between what the Irriducibili said they were doing and what they actually were doing grew ever larger. When Lazio’s owner tried to cash in on his star player, Beppe Signori, by accepting a 25-billion-lire offer from Parma, the Irriducibili rioted. Windows were smashed and skips set alight. They threatened a fans’ strike for the whole of the following season. It was true, obviously, that fans were desperate not to lose the diminutive striker to a Serie A rival, but Diabolik and his crew fuelled the riot for other reasons. It was a show of muscle to the owner. They wanted more free tickets to matches and a slice of the stewarding contracts. Diabolik realized that hundreds of hot-headed ultras could easily be bounced into outraged riots and indignant strikes, so he encouraged the mayhem. The sale of Signori was called off.

  Over the next few years the Lazio owner, Cragnotti, was repeatedly forced to give in to the Irriducibili. In 1999 he announced that the ultras would have to pay to watch the team train at Formello and that away-day packages could only be organized through the Francorosso tour company (not the ultras). One of the Irriducibili beat up the man Cragnotti had sent to negotiate with them and both proposals were dropped. The Irriducibili could continue working as tour operators, making money out of their own fans.

  In 2000 the Irriducibili were even given occasional gigs organizing the stewards in the Stadio Olimpico. The awarding of stewarding contracts became, over the years, one of the key areas of collusion between clubs and ultras. It was obvious that if the ultras were given the stewarding contract, there would be no trouble, and if they weren’t given it, there would be. It was just another way to keep them sweet. It wasn’t only club owners who could feel the heat. In their pomp, the Irriducibili had 6,500 paid-up members. On one occasion (unhappy with its reporting) they all boycotted the Gazzetta dello Sport, reducing its sales, so they said, by five thousand. They became an important political lobby, too, visited by aspiring politicians like the former Lazio player Luigi Martini, who was standing as a candidate with the right-wing National Alliance.

  By then they also had a fanzine, The Voice of the North, selling thousands of copies every week. Soon there was a radio station of the same name. The singular ‘voice’ was telling: there was only one line. If anyone cheered or applauded during a ‘fan strike’ they were hospitalized. Not even a Daspo (stadium ban) could keep Diabolik away from the ground. One eye-witness from the time remembers a policeman seeing Diabolik, then banned, strutting along the athletics track around the pitch as if he owned it.

  ‘At least don’t make it so obvious,’ a policeman said, suggesting Diabolik should keep a lower profile.

  ‘Fuck off, don’t fucking break my balls,’ the capo-ultra snapped.

  He seemed to enjoy an astonishing level of protection from the police. One police union representative complained that Diabolik had the phone numbers of police functionaries and went in and out of police stations ‘in a way that not even I can do’. ‘There was,’ one Lazio ultra remembers, ‘a total coexistence at every level.’

  Nobody knows how many free tickets the Irriducibili were receiving but given the stadium capacity was over 70,000, it seems safe to assume they were getting hundreds of complimentary tickets from the club. When Diabolik stood at the turnstiles, he could get anyone into the ground, whether they had a ticket or not.

  These were years in which the Irriducibili became famous for antisemitism. In a derby match against Roma in 1999 they displayed a banner with the taunt: ‘Auschwitz is your homeland, the gas-chambers your houses.’ In 2000 they wrote a dedication to a Serbian war-criminal, Zeljko Raznatovic: ‘Honour to the Tiger Arkan.’ It was, wrote Valerio Marchi, ‘the umpteenth signal of a taking of power, in the terraces all over Italy, of a generation of hooligans evermore attracted by political extremism, by now prevalently orientated to the most racist and radical right.’

  When those and many similar banners became national scandals, the Irriducibili felt misunderstood. They had always tried to avoid using swastikas (they did so only on one occasion, against the far-left ultras of Livorno). The Irriducibili leaders, in fact, willingly denounced Nazism but there was always, very quickly, a ‘but’. ‘I personally thoroughly condemn the Nazi crimes,’ said Paolo Arcivieri, ‘but at the same time I’m against the people of Israel who I consider intolerant and incongruent…’ Toffolo is equally fast with his ‘but’: ‘The swastika is, for me, a horrendous symbol because in its name brutal crimes have been perpetrated, but the hammer-and-sickle is its equal, a symbol which should be condemned…’

  Part of the problem was that these men – who by their own, proud admission, had never finished their schooling – were conducting a historical debate through one-liners painted on banners that could be seen by millions of TV viewers. Never did British hooligans hold such a grip on national historical debate as the Irriducibili, with their bizarre notion that because dictators had convictions they shouldn’t be repudiated. Yuri, another Irriducibili leader and – according to him – a communist, said: ‘I believe that Hitler and Stalin were great historical figures, as was Mussolini, who it’s right should be remembered as a great statesman. Maybe they made mistakes in committing the crimes they did, but I don’t feel able to condemn them because they believed in something.’

  It was a period in which the Irriducibili were gaining in strength because the team seemed to be winning everything. In the final of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1999 Lazio beat Real Mallorca. Wearing an odd yellow-and-black strip, Christian Vieri scored the first goal, meeting a cross from deep with his head, pushing out his chest to loop the ball over the keeper. Real Mallorca equalized with a tap-in from Dani but then Pavel Nedved – on the edge of the penalty area and with his back to goal – spun and hooked the ball into the net.

  That year they beat Manchester United in the European Super Cup, and then went on to win Serie A in the 1999–2000 season. Managed by Sven Goran Eriksson, it was a team that had everything: muscle, fantasy, goals and good luck. It was an international mix, combining Argentinians, Serbs, Portuguese and many Italian greats like Alessandro Nesta, Roberto Mancini and Simone Inzaghi, as well as the Chilean Marcelo Salas and the Czech Pavel Nedved. Towards the end of that season a series of bizarre refereeing decisions helped Juventus repeatedly win matches (years later, it was revealed that the club had a huge influence over referees). Before the last game of the season the Lazio ultras organized a funeral procession under the slogan, ‘Football is dead’. There were fights with police in Via Allegri in Rome, outside the headquarters of FIGC (the Italian FA). As it was, the gods intervened. Torrential rain in Perugia meant that Juventus lost while Lazio comfortably won 3–0 against Reggiana. Lazio had won their second scudetto.

  What for fans represented sporting ecstasy was, for Diabolik, a business opportunity. They already had a 600-square-metre warehouse full of berets, Babygros, slippers, beach towels, watches, lighters, military paraphernalia, fridge magnets and car stickers – anything a Lazio fan might need to show their allegiance. Now they wanted their own shops. They put up posters all over the city, advertising a new brand, ‘Original Fans’, and the opening of a store. The logo was the bowler-hatted midget, Mr Enrich, swinging his boot.

  When Grit, the ousted founder of the Irriducibili, saw the poster, he stopped in his tracks. It was his logo and it had been snatched from him by force. ‘I was disconcerted and shocked,’ he wrote in his memoir. ‘I looked at the poster and, on reflection, came to the conclusion that it was the beginning of a slow demise of the famous ultra mentality: whilst in the 80s and 90s certain behaviour was codified, in the 2000s the most absolute hypocrisy was released.’

  The Irriducibili began opening shops all over the capital. Some were little more than single-room stores in the suburbs but others were glitzy boutiques in the city centre. By 2003 they had fourteen outlets. It was largely a cash-in-hand business, so the real income was probably far higher than the 210,000 euros the ‘Original Fans’ brand declared that year. No one doubted Diabolik’s bu
siness nous, only his morals. ‘If he weren’t a gangster,’ one Lazio fan said to me, ‘Diabolik could have been a CEO.’

  The benefits weren’t only financial. In part, the stores spread the chromatic conformism vital to any gang. They created a network of contacts, making ever more porous that membrane between ordinary fans and the tight-knit crew that controlled the terraces. The ‘Original Fans’ empire meant that the emperor could now reward those who were most loyal to him by offering paid employment. With the cashflow, the contacts and the loyalty, Diabolik now had much greater ambitions. He started toying with the idea of actually buying Lazio itself.

  2001, Piazza Alimondi, Genova

  By the turn of the millennium Puffer was the undisputed leader of the Genoa ultras. Shortish, shaven-headed, smart-casual and with a slightly high-pitched voice, he was usually charming and generous. But he had a temper so violent that when he lost it the only thing to do was agree with him as fast as possible. If he sensed a threat he would attack first. ‘He’s a refined, loveable man’, says one Genoa ultra, ‘but I wouldn’t ever want him as an enemy.’

  Puffer had always loved pistols. When he was doing his military service in the mid-1980s he had proved an excellent shot at the firing range. The cadets were blindfolded and told to dismantle, and reassemble, their weapons. Puffer was so fast that his superiors tried to persuade him to stay on in the military. ‘You’re born to do this,’ one of them told him. He wasn’t interested but the love of handguns never left him. He had a collection of guns in his home.

  In 2001 one of the Genoa ultras was in prison for drugs offences. Cyclops was a simple man but a proper bruiser. He was burly and had only one eye, having lost the other to the end of a flagpole. He had been arrested in possession of three hundred grammes of cocaine and twenty-one false 50,000-lire notes. His wife had financial worries and Puffer had told another ultra to take care of her. ‘“Do her shopping,” I told him, that sort of thing. I told him two or three times. I said, “You’re not doing right by her.”’ The two men arranged to meet up to sort it out.

  ‘I’m going to go and do Puffer,’ said the ultra as he left ‘5r’, the historic HQ of the Genoa ultras. Someone overheard the threat and phoned Puffer to tell him to be careful at the meet-up.

  A few minutes later the two men were walking towards each other with the sort of speed and intent that spelt trouble. The ultra had the heavy metal of a steering lock in his hand, so Puffer pulled out his pistol. ‘Pam, pam, pam, three shots in his ankle,’ he tells me. ‘He fell onto his knees and wet himself. He’s disappeared from circulation now. Last I heard, he was living in Santo Domingo.’ He likes telling the story.

  Puffer was arrested two weeks later, the day after the Genoa–Sampdoria derby. Because he had shot low, he wasn’t tried for attempted murder and he was only sentenced to a year in prison. By the time he came out, people knew not to mess with him. ‘The message to everyone,’ a magistrate told me, ‘was: if you behave badly, I’ll shoot you.’

  It wasn’t the only shooting in Genova that year. In July the G8 summit took place in the city. Hundreds of ultras from across Italy, and thousands of protesters from across Europe, travelled to the Ligurian capital to march against what they perceived as the capitalist superpowers. ‘Another world is possible’ was the slogan. What happened that grim weekend was later described by Amnesty International as ‘the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a Western country since the Second World War’. Police shot dead one man, Carlo Giuliani, in Genova’s Piazza Alimondi and, during a night-time raid on a school being used as a dormitory, 346 police brutally assaulted ninety-three people: one sixty-two-year-old man had ten ribs, an arm and a leg broken. A British journalist lost sixteen teeth, suffered eight broken ribs, a collapsed lung and fell into a coma. In all, sixty-eight people suffered comparable injuries. The floor, walls and radiators of the school were covered in bloodstains. Police later planted evidence to justify the attack. Fifty-nine people were later beaten up and tortured in police barracks in Bolzaneto.

  The Italian police suffered a global PR disaster at the G8. Many of those beaten and tortured were foreign journalists and peaceful protestors. The only way to redress their reputation was to unearth political terrorists who might, in some way, retrospectively justify their heavy-handedness and, perhaps equally importantly, foot the bill for the damage done to the city.

  November 2002: Claudio arrested

  It was shortly after midnight on 15 November 2002 when Claudio’s doorbell in Cosenza rang. Policemen with balaclavas and guns came into the flat and told him that he was being arrested for ‘subversive association and conspiracy against the economic order of the state’. He and various other ‘no global’ agitators were being fitted up as the fall-guys for the G8 disturbances.

  ‘You’re going to the maximum-security prison in Trani,’ they said. By then Claudio had become, like his parents, a schoolteacher. One of his first thoughts was who would cover his lesson tomorrow. He picked up a copy of Leopardi’s Canti, said goodbye to his wife, whose birthday it was the next day, and was escorted by the police to the prison in Puglia. Outside it were various protestors, holding up banners in support of their arrested comrade.

  The smell of the prison struck Claudio more than the noise of metallic locks: not just the odour of shit from the cells but the constant smell of people getting high on cooking gas. The only other substance for a buzz was coffee, rolled in plastic bottles from one cell to another.

  Over the next few days he started receiving messages. The prison chaplain came to see him. ‘Padre Fedele called me,’ the chaplain said. ‘I tried to calm him down, because on the telephone he was shouting continuously. He’s very irate. He says that you guys are exceptional rebels. He said that he considers you his children and that he won’t let any harm come to you.’

  Then he received a telegram from his schoolchildren which made him well up: ‘We’re with you and await your return and your smile. We love you. Come on Cosenza!’ Later, he was transferred to a prison in Viterbo and ended up in a cell with his old friend Gianfranco. Together they chatted, trying to understand how they had ended up here. In the late 1990s the Italian police had been desperately attempting to impose law and order in Italian stadiums. Since the terraces had always been autonomous zones – ‘prisons where there was liberty’ – the ultras always defended their turf against what they saw as any invasion. In 1998, before a Coppa Italia game between Cosenza and Lazio, the Guardia di Finanza aligned sniffer dogs at the entrance to the curva. ‘Since the average of [dope] smokers in our terraces is every other fan,’ Claudio remembers, ‘they were arresting dozens of us. Not criminals, just young lads from the countryside.’ The injustice angered the anti-prohibitionist Cosentini. Within ten minutes the stadium bathroom had been stripped of everything useful as a missile, and the Guardia di Finanza was attacked and forced to retreat.

  Shortly afterwards the San Vito stadium upgraded its security measures, trying to ensure that only those with tickets could get inside. In a game against Pistoiese one young man decided to climb the high iron grid. When he dropped down the other side, he was – in front of all those queueing at the turnstiles – beaten by police. Once again the sense of injustice riled the masses who watched as an unarmed boy was beaten by three policemen, smacking his head with their truncheons. Once again, the ultras organized and attacked hard, going up against dogs and truncheons armed with stones and flagpoles.

  Every week there seemed to be an escalation. Soon, nautical flares were replying to the police’s tear-gas cannisters, which were fired – the ultras maintained – at head height. Police vehicles were ambushed. Fans were arrested and beaten up. It was happening in every stadium in Italy but the circumstances in Cosenza were unique. Here the ultras seemed dangerous not because of the violence but because of the consensus they enjoyed. Their fanzine had become a source of counter-information that revealed all manner of skulduggery in city hall. The buildings they occupied weren’t crusty dens
of criminality but open centres of creativity that enriched the city.

  The habitual rebelliousness of the city must have seemed dangerous to the Establishment and they began to investigate the ultras in a more methodical way. Because a series of paper bombs had exploded outside the offices of regional quangos at night, the police – always alert for political terrorism after the bloodshed of the 1970s – wondered whether an armed insurgency was imminent. Even if it wasn’t, they could use the bombings to decapitate a movement that was becoming ideologically subversive. Their trouble was that, as Piero had always said, Cosenza didn’t have bosses. There was no clear leader of the ultra movement: it was chaotic, instinctive, unplanned.

  But the authorities decided that Claudio – the boy who had grown up on the balcony opposite Piero, and now a teacher in his late twenties – was the mastermind. It was a foolish choice of target. Like so many ultras, he had lost his father young and was, in some ways, the adopted son of the curva. He was well-read and well-connected, eloquent and funny, but also combative and committed. When he discovered a police bug in his car, he called a press conference and wore furry handcuffs.

  Very soon the battle became serious. In the dying minutes of the last day of the 1999–2000 season police stormed the Cosenza curva. There had been no disturbances all afternoon – it was a game without anything at stake and many of the ultras were wearing flip-flops – but police ran in, shouting Claudio’s name. As he sprinted away from the helmeted men, he fell, breaking his tibia and fibula. The police set on him, beating him with truncheons and fists. One young policeman tried to stop the violence. ‘Stop it, stop it,’ he shouted.