Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  In those and many other cases, the police version was repeated ad nauseam by work-shy journalists who didn’t want to sour their contacts in the Questura. Clichés about rioting thugs were churned out, meaning that even when they were the victims, the ultras were still the scapegoats. What incensed the ultras wasn’t just the brutality – that was part of the deal. It was the fact that only one side of the story was ever told (their violence, not that of the police), and that there were stiff sentences for ultras but guaranteed impunity for police. It seemed as if journalism, and justice, were stacked against them. Here, too, was another feedback loop: the more ultras felt that journalists were reporting only the police side of the story, the more they chanted ‘Journalists are terrorists’ and the like, which only persuaded most investigators that it was safer to source their information from the Questura, not the terraces.

  Often the victims of police brutality weren’t ultras but ordinary citizens like Federico Aldrovandi (killed by police in Ferrara on the same day that Scaroni was beaten) or Giuseppe Uva (beaten to death for having moved some traffic cones for a lark when drunk in Varese) or Stefano Cucchi (who died at the hands of Carabinieri in Rome). Their names were added to all the others memorialized by ultras in matches. ‘La legge non è uguale per Cucchi’, said one Torino banner, a parody on the ideal of equality before the law (‘The law isn’t equal for Cucchi’). The ultras felt it was a repression of freedom of expression that, from March 2007, banners now had to be approved by the authorities. When, in November 2012, a Cosenza player revealed a T-shirt saying ‘Speziale is innocent’ (the man convicted for killing Inspector Raciti), he was banned from football for three years.

  To the police, however, the ultra world appeared a ‘collante’, an ‘adhesive’ that held together an underworld of criminals. It was a world in which the colours of a team were now secondary to the colour of money. In May 2007 seven members of Milan’s Guerrieri were arrested, accused of extortion, violence and threats towards the club they were alleged to be supporting. The CEO of Milan, Adriano Galliani, was even given a police escort. Almost identical charges had previously been brought against Roma ultras when two former leaders of the far-right organization FUAN (the ‘University Front of National Action’) attempted to extort tickets and away-game packages from the club.

  The traditional rivalry between many ultra groups had been superseded by political similarities. All the major firms of both Lazio and Roma were now avowedly fascist. On the Roma side were Tradizione Distinzione, the Boys and Bisl (‘basta infami, solo lame’ – ‘enough villains, only blades’). Apart from the Irriducibili, the Laziali had Only White and In Basso a Destra. It was a similar story in Milan. ‘Kassa’ and ‘Peso’ of Milan’s Guerrieri had opened a fascist night spot called Lux. Another Guerriero was tried for attempted murder. ‘Todo’, the head of Inter’s Irriducibili, was a founder of an extremist club called Black Heart, and was a former adherent of Skinhead Action. A year later, after a fire had destroyed the premises of ‘Black Heart’, it rented new premises in Via Pareto from a former NAR terrorist. It was here that ‘Todo’ opened a shop – ‘Il Sogno di Rohan’ (‘The Dream of Rohan’ – more Tolkien) – selling neo-Nazi paraphernalia. In 2011 another neo-Nazi organization, Lealtà Azione (‘Loyalty Action’), was founded and based in the same complex.

  It was often at funerals that you could glimpse how the ultras’ original separatism – keeping rivals, business and politics at bay – had now been replaced by cooperation. When the leader of Roma’s Boys, Paolo Zappavigna, died in a motorcycle accident in 2006, his burial was a reunion not of Roma ultras but of the city’s fascist fraternity. The same happened at the burial, in Milan in 2007, of Nico Azzi, a former terrorist in the Fenice organization. His funeral was attended by the leading Alleanza Nazionale politician Ignazio La Russa, as well as representatives of almost all Milan and Inter ultra groups. It seemed that, far from being ‘beyond’, many ultras were now in the midst of the political and entrepreneurial worlds.

  *

  That fatal year of confrontation between the ultras and police that changed everything. The Italian state designed a series of measures that slowly split and splintered the movement. Legislative attempts to exert control had, in truth, begun two years earlier. Under the so-called Pisano Decree, any stadium with more than 10,000 seats was supposed to have electric turnstiles, CCTV and frisking of all fans. Then, in the aftermath of the killing of Filippo Raciti, in April 2007 a new law banned the sale of more than four tickets to the same person. Daspos (stadium bans) were increased, so you could now receive a ban from one to five years for lighting a flare. Anti-Mafia measures were to be deployed against fans, enabling surveillance and the confiscation of property from those who might be violent. There would be custodial sentences of one to three years for those who broke the terms of their Daspo, and one to four years for the throwing or use of dangerous materials. Climbing a barrier brought a year’s jail term and a fine of between a thousand and five thousand euros. Arrests could also now be made in a different way: rather than in flagranza, the terminology was quasi flagranza (‘almost flagrant’), meaning that people could be arrested up to forty-eight hours after an event, when the individual ultra was well away from his mates. There were now sentences of four to sixteen years for attacks on public officials. Worst, for the ultras, was Article 9, in which anyone suspected of ‘episodes of turbulence’ at past games could be excluded from the purchase of tickets. ‘Suspicion’ and ‘presumption’ – not even a definitive sentence – were the bases on which ultras were now barred from their temple, and it only served to increase the rancour between both sides.

  But the shrewdest measure imposed by the state was the introduction in August 2009 of the Tessera del Tifoso (‘the fan’s card’). It was a sort of loyalty card issued by clubs, without which fans were unable to purchase tickets to games for which it was decided that the tessera was necessary (usually high-risk matches and away games). Many clubs saw a financial, as well as a law enforcement, opportunity and turned their particular tessera into a debit card, enabling fans to purchase merchandise in the club shop.

  The tessera was the antithesis of ultra ideology. Many felt it was both an example of schedatura (state surveillance) and a capitalist perversion of their temple. But opinion about what to do was divided. Some groups, like the Veronesi, decided to adopt the tessera en masse. In other terraces, many older ultras didn’t think it was worth the fight and urged the younger hot-heads to acquire the card and get on with it.

  But the purists took a stand. At every match new chants began against the hated loyalty card, among them ‘And I will not be carded’ and ‘Carded ultras, servants of the state’. Many terraces, previously united, were suddenly split along ideological lines, with both sides bitterly accusing the other of betrayal. One group stood accused of selling out to the state and playing by their rules, whilst the other was accused of forsaking the cardinal rule of the ultra world – presence – and of no longer supporting the team. In any ultra context, mention of the tessera became the conversational equivalent of popping the pin out of a hand grenade.

  Over the years there had been many attempts to unite the ultra movement. There had been conferences and peace summits. The nationalist wing of the movement tried to create an ultra group in support of the national team under the (usually far-right) Viking banner. None of those initiatives were particularly successful because of the infinitely fractious nature of Italian fandom. But whilst the hated tessera divided the ultras in practice, it also, paradoxically, united them in theoretical opposition. In a strange way, the tessera provided that sense of repression which, according to Elias Canetti, is vital to the defiance of a group. ‘One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd,’ he wrote, ‘is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies… whatever they [the enemies] do will be interpreted as springing from an unshakable malevolence, a
premeditated intention to destroy the crowd, openly or by stealth.’

  It was as if the ultras had found a new calling: the fight not only against each other but against repression. It was common for them to travel hundreds of kilometres to games and, having neither the tessera nor, consequently, a ticket, they would stand outside the ground chanting that they were the ‘non-tesserati’. Often opposing ultras, from inside the stadium, would applaud them. And, equally frequently, the police or stewards would fudge the rules and allow them into the stadium anyway as they could cause less damage inside than out.

  *

  Pino Coldheart, the leader of Juventus’s Drughi, was released from prison in February 2005 after serving his sentence for the armed robbery in which a Carabiniere was murdered. Such was his notoriety that even opposing ultras from Roma held up a banner the following Sunday at Juventus’s ground: ‘Ciao Pino. Bentornato’ (‘Hi Pino. Welcome Back’).

  But he didn’t like the limelight. A man of very few words, he was so silent it could be unnerving. Normally he just listened and watched. When he did speak, everyone obeyed because they trusted his shrewdness and because it wasn’t worth your while to disagree. He had been inside so long that the outside world itself seemed odd to him – faster but more superficial, both richer and yet somehow impoverished. The ultra world, too, was almost unrecognizable. There was so much money in football, he realized, that even a tiny slice of the action could make a capo-ultra rich.

  In Pino’s absence the Drughi had lost supremacy on the terraces. Now he was out of prison, the plate tectonics of the terraces were shifting. In the summer of 2005 an ultra from a rival Juventus group was stabbed. The feud lasted more than a year. In the summer of 2006 two Drughi (including Pino) were stabbed and fifty fans arrested in clashes between different Juventus ultras in Alessandria. Some of the major ultra groups moved to the Curva Nord of the old Delle Alpi stadium, leaving the Drughi to battle it out with the Bravi Ragazzi (‘Goodfellas’) for control of the south terrace. In March 2009 Pino was again wounded by three thugs who police believed to be from the Bravi Ragazzi group. The leader of the Bravi Ragazzi, Andrea Puntorno, had an arm broken in a fight. Umberto Toia, the leader of another group, Tradizione, was beaten up outside his bar (Black & White) and shots were fired against its metal shutters.

  It wasn’t just established ultra groups who were vying for access to the tens of thousands of euros available from ticket touting. Organized crime began casting an envious eye at the easy money to be made. The attraction wasn’t just the profits but the impunity that accompanied them. Ticket-touting wasn’t a criminal offence (in the jargon, it was called an ‘administrative offence’) and it carried an almost negligible risk compared to drug-dealing. It was also a chance to invest and launder capital amassed from the drug trade. Some policemen speculated that the violence against capo-ultras wasn’t only inflicted by rival ultras but also by mafiosi who hadn’t received the return they expected from tickets in which they had invested.

  For their part, various ultra gangs were receptive to mobsters on the terraces because they could enforce order. They carried a threat of such lethal violence that the capo-ultras now felt protected, even untouchable. There wouldn’t be any more broken arms and stabbings, they hoped, if they stood alongside notorious underworld figures. For those ultras, like Andrea Puntorno, who doubled as drug-dealers, the Mafia also offered new supply chains, contacts and distribution channels. Two worlds that already seemed to overlap now became, on certain terraces, even closer.

  The result was that each Juventus ultra group forged an alliance with one or two Mafia clans. Puntorno was known to be close to the Sicilian Li Vecchi family and the Macrì clan in Calabria. It wasn’t as if the ultra bosses hid those connections. It actually suited them to boast about their underworld connections in order to increase, exponentially, the fear they instilled: Loris Grancini, leader of Juventus’s Vikings, once boasted: ‘It’s true, I’m very close to the [Calabrian] Rappocciolo clan.’ Pino Coldheart himself, calling on contacts he had made in prison, approached Placido Barresi, the head of the Piedmont arm of the Calabrian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta. Years later, an aged Barresi would admit that ‘united Calabria’ had infiltrated the Juventus terraces.

  By 2010 the Italian secret services – the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, known as Aise – were aware that the Juventus terraces were becoming a home not just for political extremists from the far right but also for Mafia outfits. The agent commissioned to investigate that murky world needed an informant on the inside. The man he found was embedded deep within the Drughi but was also a gregarious, friendly man: Ciccio Bucci.

  By then, after years of frenetic dealing and late-night dashes back to Turin, Bucci and his wife had drifted apart. Football, and his phone, seemed to interrupt everything. He was rarely at home and when he was, his wife felt he was too indulgent towards his son, Fabio. He would spoil him in the way absent parents often do. Gabriella didn’t like it when Bucci took their young son into the city for sleepovers. Eventually, the pair separated but remained on good terms. Bucci bought a small flat in the next-door village, in Margarita, with its petite castle and rust-brick church. By then he was so close to Juventus staff that he sometimes slept over at the flat of Stefano Merulla, the head of the club’s ticket sales division.

  In many ways, he was actually closer to the club hierarchy than he was to the Drughi. Since Pino Coldheart had come back on the scene, Bucci felt he was being slowly sidelined within his own group. Bucci’s quick patter and matiness contrasted sharply with Pino’s brooding, reticent presence, and Bucci felt constantly judged. It was as if his place in the crew, his whole income even, were under threat. There were new faces that he had never seen before, Calabrians who seemed to be suddenly at the centre of the action. Sometimes, speaking on the phone to his handler in the secret services, Bucci felt relief at being able to let off steam. Since his marriage had broken down, it was the only time anyone seemed to listen to him.

  2011–12, Genoa

  When Puffer emerged from prison, having served his sentence for threatening his (now ex-) wife, he seemed different. On the day of his arrest in 2005 he had decided – after twenty years of heavy use – to give up cocaine. In prison he had read all the works of an Italian sociologist called Francesco Alberoni and had sat through two-hour sessions with a prison psychologist every Tuesday afternoon. ‘It helped me become more patient and self-critical,’ he remembers.

  Like a lot of people in recovery, he had put on a bit of weight. His head was still shaved, his face taut, but he looked rounder. ‘I’m now a breathless old nag,’ he joked with a wheezy laugh. He was approaching his fiftieth birthday and had started to dress smartly. Under his Burberry jacket, his initials were stitched into the paunch of his immaculate blue shirt with its cut-away collars. He had designer glasses, a black-and-silver Rolex and brown suede shoes with raffish green laces.

  He had started to build a bit of a business empire. He opened one restaurant in 2002, in Piampaludo just west of Genova, and then in 2010 opened another in Urbe, near the Piedmont border. Soon he would add a focaccia bar to the business. When he was released from house arrest, his friends organized a party to celebrate his new-found freedom. Many ultras were there, as were a few players from Genoa, including Omar Milanetto and Beppe Sculli.

  Piazza Alimondi was now his kingdom. He lived in a flat above it, while ‘5r’ – the historic headquarters of the Genoa ultras of which he was the leader – was just off it. When he sat in the bar underneath his house, drinking red wine in the early afternoon and smoking his Camels, passers-by would constantly shout hello. If he ate a quick bowl of pasta – he was given the ‘high table’ in the corner – so many people shook his hand that it was hard to eat. He would hold out his left hand whilst he ate with his right.

  The fear he had inspired in the past was now mixed with affection. He was generous, buying people drinks or giving coins to passing beggars. Now he was single, he put up young lads
who were in trouble, even Sampdoria fans. He was hard with them to help get them off drugs: ‘I’ll break your other leg if you go back on that shit,’ he would say. Now, he complained, anyone could get hold of drugs. ‘They’re the only thing in the last thirty years that have gone down in price.’

  He still exuded authority. At every meeting in 5r, with people packed on the red-and-blue benches along the walls, or drinking Ceres and playing table-football, people listened the minute he spoke. He passed on the intelligence he had heard about CCTV, about police operations or opposing fans.

  In May 2011 there was a strange meeting in a restaurant, Coccio, in Sturla, an eastern suburb of Genova. It was mid-afternoon and the restaurant was closed to the public. At the meeting were two footballers, Domenico Criscito (Genoa) and Beppe Sculli (Lazio), two ultras (Puffer and Cyclops) and a Bosnian criminal called Safet Altic. It was a rum crowd. Safet was a Bosnian debt-collector for the Sicilian Fiandaca clan who had also, in the past, been involved in jewellery heists and drug-dealing. He was so well-known to the Lazio player, Sculli, that the latter called him ‘fratè’ (‘brother’). Sculli himself was one of the most opaque of Italian footballers from recent decades. The grandson of a convicted Calabrian mafioso known as U Tiradrittu (‘Mr Straight-Ahead’), he had already been banned from football for eight months in 2001 for match-fixing in a game between Crotone and Messina. He had played for Genoa for years but had recently moved to Lazio.