Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  A few months after that tumultuous summer, the head of the Association of Genoa Clubs organized a meeting near Rapallo between Preziosi and the club’s leading ultras. It was supposed to be an occasion to clear the air but it turned into a verbal mugging of the President.

  ‘When you came to us,’ one of the ultras said to Preziosi, ‘and told us, “I’ve bought all the games, I’ve bought the lot”, no one said anything. OK? Nothing. Fine, maybe it suited us, but we have a vow of silence, a blood pact, President. You should know that it’ll remain a blood pact.’

  Preziosi kept denying everything. He was interrupted and shouted at and rough-housed. ‘Just let me talk a bit,’ he pleaded. ‘Just give me the chance to talk a second.’ The successful businessman seemed so intimidated that he started insulting himself: ‘Shit that I am… I’m a dick…’ It was almost as if the hierarchy had been inverted, with the ultras assuming control and Preziosi pressured and belittled.

  One ultra was recording the conversation and was bullying Preziosi for, investigators assumed, a confession that could serve for blackmail. Preziosi was repeatedly asked what, exactly, had happened in the previous season. The more he came up with bizarre and unbelievable explanations for his behaviour, the more irascible the ultras became.

  The recording came to light a few months later, in November 2005, when Puffer was again arrested. His wife had phoned police saying that he had threatened to kill her. He was arrested as he was driving towards her house with two guns. His residence was searched and investigators discovered the recording of the Rapallo meeting.

  The events of 2005 cast Genoa in a dark light. The ultras weren’t involved in organizing match-fixing but through their connections at the club they might have had foreknowledge of it and – through betting – have profited from that knowledge. They had also, it seems certain, tried to entrap the hapless Genoa president into a confession so that they could profit further. One Genoa ultra, with decades of ‘militanza’ behind him, describes Puffer as ‘very intelligent, a born leader, but clearly attracted to the dark side’. In those years the ultra scene in Genoa was beginning to appear like the wild west. In 2006 a man nicknamed ‘the shark’ – who had previously been in prison for throwing his girlfriend off a balcony – shot two fellow ultras in the legs with a Smith & Wesson pistol at the famous ‘5r’ HQ.

  But the difficulty of writing about criminals amongst the ultras is that, in many ways, they’re only partly representative of the movement. It’s like the old truism that a falling tree in a forest is louder than thousands growing in silence. Every time you go to the gradinata nord in Genoa you’ll see ultras handing out free flags to newborn babies being carried by young mothers in marsupials (‘Born a Griffon’ say the flags). There are ultras who love this club so much that they go on pilgrimage to the grave of the club’s founder, Dr Spensley, in Germany where he died in the First World War (the grave was discovered by two Genovese scout leaders in 1993). Roberto Scotto is still working in the Genova Insieme cooperative, helping out anyone in the city who has fallen on hard times. Each time there’s a natural disaster – and Genova often suffers fatal floods – the ultras are always on the frontline.

  That diversity is evident amongst the ultras of every team. In Catania the career paths of various ultra leaders show how impossible it is to box them into labelled compartments. Ciccio ‘Fascista’ has now died. Stickers of his unshaven face are all over the Curva Sud. The leader of Catania’s Irriducibili has been imprisoned for extortion, including demanding five grand from a player and a few hundred thousand from a film producer. And yet another former ultra, a member of the Indians back in the 1990s, was previously an MEP and is now the city’s mayor.

  Shortly after Genoa’s match-fixing scandal in 2005, the club’s former coach, Franco Scoglio, died. He had once joked he would die talking about the club he loved, and that’s how it happened. He was live on television, arguing on the phone with the club’s president, Preziosi, in his passionate, eloquent way. Suddenly, he slipped in his chair and fell to his right. He never regained consciousness. It was an occasion for the Sampdoria ultras to show their wit. Since Scoglio had died on the phone to Preziosi, the Sampdoria ultras – pretending that they thought he had telephonic powers of extermination – hung out a banner: ‘Preziosi, call my mother-in-law.’

  The ultras had always had a great sense of humour. An Ancona group once had a counterfeiter who turned out forged tickets. At the bottom, in tiny letters, he wrote: ‘This is a false ticket, but no one will realize anyhow.’ Often the banners were punchy one-liners, usually the result of late-night drinking sessions in the group’s favourite bar as everyone came up with suggestions. They could be surreal (‘Genoa Cod’) or silly (‘Honour to Sylvester the Cat’). Even the names of the groups were often inspired. In 1997 various female ultras in Cosenza founded a new group called Curvaiole, a play on words that meant both ‘terracers’ and ‘curvies’.

  23 January 2006, Cosenza

  ‘They’ve arrested the Monk.’ Word went round very fast. People phoned friends and turned on the TV. ‘Padre Fedele is in prison.’

  The accusation was that he had repeatedly raped a nun within the ‘Franciscan Oasis’. In the legalese of the arrest warrant, he had forced a Sicilian nun to ‘conjoin’ with him. Behind that flat term, the details of the five attacks – between February and June 2005 – were gothic. The attacks are alleged to have taken place five times. After he gave the nun in question, who lived at the Oasis as part of the Poor Sisters of San Francis, a pill to make her compliant, he allowed others to rape her and filmed the violence. Before the first rape, on 28 February, Padre Fedele was supposed to have insinuated that he knew a Messina mafioso as a way to intimidate her. It was claimed that the next two rapes were watched by perverts who had paid six-figure sums. Later, the nun allegedly received threats: ‘Be careful what you do, we’re very close.’ The most non-violent of all ultras, the one who had spearheaded the campaign for peace within the sport and had been a vocal supporter of a centre for victims of domestic violence, was himself now accused of the worst violence.

  Salacious wiretaps of Padre Fedele talking dirty on the phone were released by the investigative team. Soon, newspapers were reprinting intimate telephone conversations in which the charismatic monk asked women about their breasts and underwear and where he could put his hands. Padre Fedele vehemently denied the accusations. On the day of his arrest he said: ‘Today is the most beautiful day of my life because I feel closer to Jesus Christ, persecuted and crucified.’ There were various journalists outside the prison, and standing alongside them were Drainpipe, Claudio and his wife. ‘We’ll never believe it,’ they shouted.

  Later that night other Cosenza ultras gathered outside the prison. They kept singing the song that Padre Fedele had popularized in the stadium: ‘Maracanà, maracanà, we’ve come this far, and we’ll sing and we’ll shout, come on Cosenza, olé olé.’ They brought along the striscione that bore what had become Padre Fedele’s motto: ‘Fanhood yes, violence no, peace.’ Over the decades, thousands of ultras had been imprisoned. Invariably, their names were chanted and their freedom pleaded. But this arrest put all those other ones into the shade. At the game the following Sunday, at home to Ragusa, a simple banner appeared: ‘Free the Monk.’

  The arrest of Padre Fedele, the portly, red-blooded man who had served as a spiritual guide to the ultras of not just Cosenza but of Italy, became a national sensation. Everyone tried to understand quite who he really was. His friend, the pornstar Luana Borgia, said: ‘Let’s say he’s a monk who definitely isn’t indifferent to female charm.’ She spoke of how he had ‘a long eye’ for women. A journalist who knew him well, Emanuele Giacoia, described him as ‘exuberant, open and generous’ but with a character that was ‘fiery, sometimes uncontainable’. Many women were angered at the sight of an alleged rapist being immediately defended by a male-dominated gang. Although there were many women who stood by him, none were as notorious as Cosenza’s (mainly mal
e) ultras.

  Padre Fedele had always longed for the limelight. His desire to be the protagonist was almost pathological. But now the national spotlight was on him and instead of adulation, there was vilification. TV shows and newspapers satirized his weaknesses. People he had worked with in Africa accused him of womanizing. Journalists who used to love the fireworks he could produce now wrote wistful profiles of their fallen hero.

  Most people outside Cosenza simply assumed he was guilty. In an era in which the libidinous criminals of the Catholic Church were being revealed across the globe, Padre Fedele seemed another example of brutal power being disguised by piety. It was alleged that he had persuaded other women to have sex with him in return for helping their asylum applications. In the past he had sometimes appeared mildly ridiculous, but never so sinister.

  The Cosenza ultras stood by him, however. They simply didn’t believe the accusations. Drainpipe wrote a long, open letter to Padre Fedele in prison. ‘You took me to Africa,’ it said, ‘where you showed me what it meant to run a leprosy clinic, what it meant to construct a nursery in the desert, to feed starving children who before meeting you had only known cassava and locusts. We’ve argued a thousand times. Never, never, never in these three decades would I have ever thought, even for a moment, that what they are accusing you of was a possibility.’

  Drainpipe had often slept in the Oasis as a night warden and was sure that he would have known if something were amiss. He affirmed that Padre Fedele had shown the ultras ‘a way of solidarity and true love towards those who are suffering and are among the forgotten of this planet’. He said Padre Fedele had only ever shown ‘clear love towards the marginalized’. Claudio remembers that Padre Fedele was accused of the one crime that the ultras would have found unforgiveable: ‘We would have forgiven him anything, even murder, but never rape.’

  Many of Padre Fedele’s friends felt that he had been framed. It was as if someone had deliberately looked for his weak spot – and few denied that women were his weak spot – and thus arranged the accusations. They were, for many, simply too gothic to be believable: the mystery pill, the six-figure sums – first €160,000 then €100,000 – to watch the rape, the Mafia threats. They read like a crime novel.

  To those ultras in Cosenza who had been repeatedly arrested or even sectioned, it looked like another stitch-up. They knew Padre Fedele could be a buffone (a clown) and a bruiser. He was a casinista, a troublemaker, like his ultras. He had showily slept under bridges to highlight homelessness or gone on hunger strike because Cosenza might be relegated. But Padre Fedele had often denounced sexual violence. His battle on behalf of a young woman had led to the arrest of seven people. He had courageously denounced drug-dealers. He had built a multi-million pound ‘Oasis’ over which Church authorities were casting an envious eye. He had also denounced corruption in – and naturally proposed himself as the new head of – a hospital that later became the biggest bankruptcy in Calabrian healthcare. Far from being a rapist, his supporters said, Padre Fedele was actually a stone in the shoe of the corrupt.

  Drainpipe dared write as much publicly. In the Cosenza fanzine, he wrote that ‘the hierarchy of the Cosentine church is completing a project which they had in mind for a long time and which has one great obstacle: Padre Fedele’. He accused the Church of wanting to take over the Franciscan Oasis, to turf out the needy and to turn it, effectively, into something more like a hotel because ‘they know only one God: money’. Claudio, as editor of the magazine, was sued for defamation by the Bishop, and declared himself ‘ready to burn on the bonfire’ rather than renounce what had been written. He repeated the conviction that there was a ‘conspiracy’ against Padre Fedele.

  February 2006: a Lazio take-over bid

  In July 2004, Lazio had been bought by a man called Claudio Lotito. Lotito had made his money (like many football owners) from cleaning and refuse contracts with local governments. Lazio supporters were suspicious. Lotito had married into one of the richest (and Roma-supporting) families in the capital, called Mezzaroma. As well as their involvement in Roma, members of the family were also involved with Siena and Salernitana football clubs. The manner in which he had bought the shares was also obscure – many felt he had used third parties to disguise the extent of his ownership.

  Although Lotito had rescued Lazio from bankruptcy and possible extinction, there was soon a nasty surprise. The club was invoiced for €107 million for unpaid taxes by the Agenzia delle Entrate (the equivalent of HMRC). Repeatedly in the past, the debts of football clubs had been eased by government legislation, and Toffolo and Diabolik, two of the Irriducibili leaders, felt that a whiff of cordite might nudge the tax authorities towards indulgence. They organized a protest involving thousands of fans which, unsurprisingly, turned violent. Many supporters and police were hospitalized. The ultras were publicly demonstrating the chaos they could cause if the government didn’t offer debt relief, which is exactly what happened. The government of Silvio Berlusconi spread the debt over twenty-three years.

  In many ways, the ultras were just defending their club. But they had also performed a huge favour for their new president and there was an expectation of something in return. Lotito, however, made no concessions. The stewards on the turnstiles became officious. There were no more free tickets. Banners were confiscated. The terraces, and especially the spaces beneath the stairs, were no longer souks. ‘He’s taking our bread,’ Diabolik said on the phone to Toffolo. ‘This guy isn’t letting us work.’ It was very clear that there was going to be no quid pro quo.

  The Irriducibili decided to protest. They smuggled in banners – ‘Lotito Enemy of the [Curva] North’ and ‘The Battle-cry is Lotito to the Executioner’ – and began an assiduous campaign of intimidation. Manure was dumped outside the club’s headquarters. Messages were faxed, posted and left on his windscreen. ‘Be careful of your beautiful little wife,’ said one. ‘If you don’t want to find him dead with his throat cut,’ said another message left at the club, ‘that bastard, disgusting pig has got to go. We’ll cut him to pieces if that bastard doesn’t go.’

  The threats continued throughout the autumn of 2005. It was a period of many extremist gestures: a swastika was displayed during the game at Empoli in November, and another, plus a Celtic cross, at Livorno in December. The chants were politically similar: ‘Duce, Duce’ and ‘Livornese Jew’. At Lazio–Ascoli in January, a banner read: ‘No one will touch our [Roman] salute.’ Very often such sentiments are the first exhibits in the case against the Irriducibili’s political extremism, but they invariably appear when the ultra group is putting pressure on the club owner (who has to pay the fines and suffer the consequences of stadium closures).

  Police had, by then, been alerted to the death threats made against Lotito, and the phones of the Irriducibili leaders were tapped. In one intercept, Toffolo gives an eloquent description of how he sees the role of the ultras: ‘These people have to understand that we are the trade union.’ To one listener he boasts: ‘You’re about to talk to someone who represents 15,000 people.’

  The Irriducibili duly called a fans’ strike. But it began to hurt them as much as it did Lotito. The thousands who didn’t go to games didn’t spend their money in the Irriducibili’s shops to get kitted out for match days. In a text message, Diabolik wrote: ‘If this bastard doesn’t go, we’re ruined because from this year we’ve started to dip into the other account that until now has never been touched. With costs higher than income we can’t do anything other than end up bankrupt.’

  It looked as if the good times were over for the Irriducibili but a solution was on the horizon. A Neapolitan businessman was planning to buy Lazio and had identified the old Lazio hero, Giorgio Chinaglia, as the ideal man to front the takeover bid. He wanted the Irriducibili as the foot soldiers who could force Lotito to, as they said, ‘sit at the table’. During that 2005–06 season, the Irriducibili were in almost daily contact with members of the consortium. They were given funds for anti-Lotito banners an
d their radio station was granted the exclusive rights to any interview with the legendary Chinaglia. People who appeared to side with Lotito – a Sky sports analyst, the team coach, one of the players – were threatened and insulted. Others were invited to dish dirt on Lotito and were denounced when they didn’t. Even some members of the Irriducibili complained about the ferocity of the campaign. Yuri fretted on the phone to Diabolik that Toffolo had his ‘twenty veins’ out, shouting at a woman who had defended the coach. ‘We need to make friends, not enemies,’ Yuri said.

  Toffolo was equally incandescent during phone-ins on the group’s radio station, The Voice of the North. When one listener disagreed with him and defended the coach (who had insulted the ultras by dedicating a victory to the president and not the fans), Toffolo rounded on a fellow Lazio fan: ‘What’s your problem, you jerk? I’ll come and grab you in your home. What’s your problem, villain?’

  From reading the transcripts of months of phone calls as the Irriducibili tried to enable a takeover of their team, a sad, sordid world emerges. The Irriducibili come across as both menacing but amazingly unrealistic. At one point, Toffolo, half-dreaming, says, ‘I’ve got Lazio in my hands.’ ‘I’m a power,’ he boasts. He starts calling Chinaglia ‘the President’. (Years later a medical report described Diabolik as suffering from ‘symptoms of psychosis and mental instability’, but since that document was provided by his defence team to arrange his release from a custodial sentence, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.) Theirs was a nihilistic world in which the only languages spoken were brute force and cash-in-hand. One of the Irriducibili’s leaders said to a person who wasn’t cooperating: ‘I don’t care anything for ethics. We’re on the streets and on the streets anything can happen, understood?’