by Tobias Jones
Normally the significance of these instances of extremism was minimized as the acts of fringe fanatics. But the fringe fanatics were becoming the political mainstream. In February 2017 (a year before his party won over 17 per cent of the vote) Matteo Salvini spoke at a rally of the Lega, the party of which he is leader. ‘Italy needs a mass cleansing,’ he shouted into the microphone. ‘Street by street, suburb by suburb, with strong methods if needed, because there are entire parts of Italy out of control.’ A year later, during his successful election campaign to become the governor of Lombardy, the Lega politician Attilio Fontana pressed the same button: ‘We need to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race and our society should continue to exist or should be cancelled.’
The politicians of the Lega were, by now, deploying exactly the same ‘Identitarian’ discourse that had proved so successful for the fascist parties of Forza Nuova and CasaPound. Ever since 2014 Salvini had been reinventing both himself and his party. The Lega Nord had always been a separatist, or federalist, movement, and its founder, Umberto Bossi – though virulently xenophobic – was also a lifelong anti-fascist. Salvini, though, knew which way the political wind was blowing and throughout 2014 and 2015 he assiduously courted the far right. He shared a platform with CasaPound in 2014 at an anti-immigration rally called ‘No Invasion’ and in February 2015, in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, he launched – alongside CasaPound and a delegation of Greece’s Golden Dawn – a movement called ‘Sovereignty’. ‘There’s an operation of ethnic substitution co-ordinated by Europe,’ said Salvini. A CasaPound activist, Mauro Antonini, became the spokesman for one of the Lega’s most outspoken extremists, Mario Borghezio (the man who said ‘Hitler did many great things’). Salvini, it was clear, had gone all-in on the Identitarian gamble. At another rally, under the ‘Stop Invasion’ slogan, he proclaimed: ‘There’s an attempted genocide [of native Italians] going on…’
That sudden inversion of roles, with white Europeans cast as a threatened species, was beautifully beguiling because everyone wanted to be told they were victims. It shifted the blame elsewhere. If there were a conspiracy organized by powerful forces, we were absolved of responsibility, which is always a relief. It meant that nothing was our fault because we’re oppressed. The simplicity of the narrative erased all the epic complexities of modern life, replacing them with a binary black-and-white solution. But the seductive argument had a grim and hidden catch: the need to finger those who are responsible, to find the familiar scapegoats – invariably Americans, Semites, Muslims and immigrants. Because if we’re suppressed, it requires defence and then liberation, it calls for squadristi and soldiers.
For the resurgent extremists, there was one clear precedent of what they called ‘ethnic cleansing’ at the expense of loyal, Italian nationalists. The Foibe are the karst sinkholes in modern-day Slovenia and Croatia into which hundreds (no one knows the precise number) of Italians were thrown to their deaths between 1943 and 1947. An acutely controversial topic, the Foibe massacres were in part an operation by Yugoslav (and Italian) partisans against fascist forces but were also an attempt by Tito’s forces to rid Istria and Dalmatia of Italians and so pave the way for annexation. Hundreds of thousands of Italians fled their homes. The subject had been almost taboo in Italy during the First Republic but ever since a new law was passed by Berlusconi’s government in 2004, 10 February has become a day of remembrance for the ‘exiles and the Foibe’. For Italian fascists, it naturally became one of the most sacred dates in their calendar, a chance to commemorate not only the dead but also to persuade sceptics that the eradication of Italian patriots wasn’t a fantasy but a historical reality.
In many ways the ultras were the yeast in this rapidly rising, far-right dough, frequently sliding from the terraces into political parties. Yari Chiavenato, the man who had hanged a black mannequin in Verona’s stadium in 1996, had become a leader of Forza Nuova. He had parked cars in the shape of a swastika as a joke, and then become an electoral candidate for the Lega. He was also the chairman of Fortress Europe, another white-supremacist organization whose name echoed Hitler’s Festung Europa. Andrea Arbizzoni, former capo-ultra of Monza, was part of a neo-Nazi organization called Lealtà Azione and was elected to the city council. Checco Latuada, an ultra from Pro Patria (a club in the Lombard town of Busto Arsizio) had, in 2007, celebrated Hitler’s birthday in his pub. He became a town councillor in Berlusconi’s Freedom Party. (When Pro Patria ultras booed Kevin Prince Boateng, the Ghanaian then playing for Milan, Latuada defended them by saying: ‘Almost all the terraces, almost all the organized groups have the style and symbology of the extreme right.’) It’s true that they were very minor political figures, but others made it to parliament: Domenico Furgiuele, a former ultra for the Calabrian side Sambiase, and Daniele Belotti, an ultra from Atalanta (Bergamo), were both elected to the Camera as MPs for the Lega party (which by now had dropped its ‘Northern’ prefix). Belotti once claimed ‘I’ve always whistled [jeered] Balotelli,’ the black Italian striker.
At the genesis of the movement the ultras had borrowed the phrases and slogans of political extremism but now the exact opposite was happening: Italy’s far right was copying the rhetorical rhyming couplets of ultra banners. At many political rallies and protests, banners are now unfurled using the ubiquitous Ultras Liberi font as if the terraces’ slick sloganeering has been recognized as the surest way to get a photograph into the papers or the evening news. Nuance of thought was threatening, a sign of dandification, whereas the punchier the message, the more likely it was to get noticed. One-liners – like Salvini’s incessant tweets – spoke straight to the belly of the electorate. (Even opposition to Salvini – expressed through thousands of bedsheets hung on balconies – owed much to the tradition of punchy striscioni.)
As well as the means of delivery being comparable, the message itself was often identical. That old fascist dictum (actually borrowed from Roman legionnaires and gladiators) ‘Usque Ad Finem’ – ‘To the End’ – was a battle cry for both the ultras and far right. Many ultra groups had been called ‘Indians’ back in the 1970s and 1980s, partly out of an instinctive anti-Yankeeism but also because it enforced the notion of indigeneity. Now, in an era of so-called Identitarianism, that boast of belonging, so central to ultra mentality, was easily converted into an anti-immigration political message. All the language and imagery of the ultras, forever pitting an ‘us’ against outsiders, was suddenly useful for politicians who wanted to play the race card. The object pronoun had a long, if troubled, political pedigree. ‘A noi!’ – ‘to us’ – was an old D’Annunzian motto during the occupation of Fiume, and later a rallying cry for any territorial expansionism, be it in Abyssinia or on the terraces. Salvini’s use of ‘noi’ – ‘Noi con Salvini’ – was a shrewd piece of political positioning, identifying him with us and, the subtext went, against ‘them’. The Northern League had always had a ‘them’ against which to define itself (the South of the country) but now a combination of political ambition and a new scapegoat meant that the League dropped its Northern prefix. It mutated into its opposite, no longer a secessionist movement (it had started out wanting the North to split from the South) but a patriotic and nationalist one. A new slogan – ‘Prima Gli Italiani’ (‘Italians First’) – was coined.
June 2015: Padre Fedele absolved
Padre Fedele was almost eighty by the time he was cleared of the accusation of being a rapist. He still wore the brown habit, even though he had been expelled from his order. It was slightly stained now and covered with loose, white hairs. His eyes were the same light brown, surrounded by a head and beard of white hair, but he was weary, weighed down not just by age but by an accusation that had hung around his neck for almost a decade. He kept saying to everyone that he had lost his mother when still a young boy, and how women had always been for him, first and foremost, mother figures. ‘It’s strange,’ he told me, ‘the older I get, the more I feel my mother’s absence.’
For the last few years he
had been in and out of courtrooms. The guilty verdict of the initial trial was upheld on appeal, but the Cassazione, the Italian Supreme Court, annulled that verdict and sent the case back to the appeals court. There, in June 2015, over nine years after he had first been arrested, he was cleared of all the charges. It had emerged that the victim had repeatedly fabricated other attacks – two in Rome and one in Reggio Calabria. There, too, the stories had been cinematically graphic – kidnappings and druggings – even though the photographic and medical evidence gave no credence to her story. The whole case was a tragedy. The nun in question was perhaps trying to communicate or explain some sexual activity but, unable to do so within the normal parameters because of her ecclesiastical position, she had invented extraordinary fantasies around what had happened. Padre Fedele had spent the autumn of his life fighting to clear his name and even now he had his reputation back, it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t allowed to say mass any more, and so much mud had been slung that he kept talking about the case for years afterwards.
He would park his Ford Fiesta around the city, with its peeling plastic letters on both sides: ‘The Paradise of the Poor’. It was his new initiative. He wanted to build a new Oasis and was trying to raise the funds for it. There was a mobile number on the side of the car and an offer: ‘I listen to all.’ As he sat there, waiting for people to ask him for help, Cosentini would just come up and shake his hand. But he looked broken. He could still work up a decent head of steam when he was angry but he was quieter now. It was now his former teenagers – Luca, Claudio, Paride, Ciccio, Drainpipe and all the rest – who were keeping an eye out for him. As in loving families, everyone had learnt to forgive each others’ faults.
That profound bond between a Franciscan friar and his ultras is one of the most fascinating stories of this whole subculture. Because although they originally seemed poles apart ideologically, in the end they seem very similar. Like so many men within the movement, Padre Fedele was mourning his absent parents from a young age. Lacking a family after most of his relatives moved to America and Canada, he found his on the terraces. In many ways, he was as hard-up, short-tempered and blue-collar as any of the lads with whom he rubbed shoulders.
But perhaps more surprising were the ways in which the ultras came to seem not dissimilar to Padre Fedele. Apart from Pastachina, few ever found his faith (Drainpipe was so disgusted by the Church that he paid €14 to be unbaptized). But all were inspired by Padre Fedele’s charitable example. Within days of his best friend Piero’s death, Drainpipe set up a charity called La Terra di Piero, which opened playgrounds for disabled children and dug wells in, and took provisions to, Africa. One of his volunteers, Plato, calls it ‘going on a mission’. Gianfranco started his People’s Boxing Gym inside the San Vito stadium with a sign on the door: ‘This gym repudiates all forms of racism and fascism.’ ‘We’re always aiming,’ he says above the thumps and kicks, ‘to improve the lot of the most disadvantaged in society. If someone has money, they contribute. If they don’t, they train just the same.’
Thanks in part to Padre Fedele, the ferment and froth of the terraces had been harnessed by visionary leaders to create countless social projects for the benefit of the dispossessed. Those leaders were still, as you would expect, uncompromising: ‘Never a backwards step’ is the slogan of Gianfranco’s gym. They hadn’t gone, in any sense, soft. When CasaPound militants attempted to set up an office in Cosenza they were run out of town. But the Cosentini’s uncompromising stance wasn’t about attacking enemies, but rather about inclusivity. The astonishing openness of the curva, so evident at the movement’s genesis, had been taken into the city. Padre Fedele somehow taught atheist guerrillas the essence of his Gospels. ‘How can anyone say they’re not believers,’ he ticks me off, ‘when you see what they do?’
But if they had, in one sense, an atheistic faith, those men had lost all trust in the Italian state. After Claudio and Gianfranco were imprisoned on charges of political terrorism and Padre Fedele tried for sexual violence, the Cosenza ultras felt that they were being punished for being revolutionaries. The fact that the policeman who investigated Padre Fedele was married to a local judge, herself the daughter of a powerful local politician, convinced them that the Establishment had a hand in his downfall. The Italian state has never enjoyed much consensus in Calabria but amongst the ultras it was, by now, non-existent. ‘The real Mafia,’ Claudio wrote in a novel thinly disguising the Cosenza story, ‘nestles in the police station.’ ‘If you want to be someone here,’ he wrote in another passage, ‘you have to be a mason, a criminal, a card-carrying politician or else linked to the underground sectors of the Church.’
*
On 26 September 2011 a sailing boat seemed to be drifting near Alghero, on Sardinia’s northwest coast. The boat was flying under a French flag, with the name Kololo II. There was something suspicious about the boat’s position and when the Guardia di Finanza went aboard, they found a man called Roberto Grilli. In the hull were 477 clingfilmed bricks that turned out to contain 503 kilogrammes of pure cocaine.
Arrested and imprisoned, Grilli began cooperating with investigators and revealing everything he knew about the criminal underworld of Rome. What emerged from his testimony was a city in which various criminal gangs and Mafias coexisted on their own turfs, called batterie. There was no domineering organization but instead a complex web of connections between the highest, and lowest, of Roman society. The spider at the centre of that web was a former terrorist from NAR, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, the most lethal fascist group of the Years of Lead. Massimo Carminati was nicknamed ‘the Blinded’ because he had once lost an eye in a shootout with police. Many within his inner circle were ultras, both from Roma and Lazio. One of his closest collaborators was ‘Rommel’, leader of Roma’s Opposta Fazione group and present at the armed robbery, back in 1994, that cost Kapplerino, his accomplice, his life. Another of his regular contacts was Mario Corsi, ‘Marione’, the former NAR militant and now host of a Roma fans’ radio station.
Investigators placed many phones under surveillance and overheard one man talking about a gang operating in the north of Rome, in the Ponte Milvio area. ‘The Neapolitans and Albanians are one thing… [but] these are shit people, these are evil people.’ He was referring to the batteria belonging to Diabolik. He had links, it seemed, to a Neapolitan mafioso called ‘the Madman’ (so called as he was so adept at faking psychiatric illnesses to avoid prison time). The Neapolitans were supplying Diabolik with narcotics that, with his commercial nous and distribution network, he would sell in his stronghold just north of the Tiber. In one bust the police seized 185 kilogrammes of hashish. It looked like clingfilmed blocks of chocolate.
In the midst of the investigation Lazio enjoyed one of their greatest games. It was the first time the team had ever met their hated rivals, Roma, in a cup final. It was the Coppa Italia, May 2013. The Laziali’s main banner displayed the defiant saying of a Roman centurion during the sack of Rome, quoted by Livy and borrowed by D’Annunzio: ‘Hic Manebimus Optime’ (‘We’ll be fine here’). After Lazio’s 1–0 victory – thanks to a tap-in by the Bosnian Senad Lulić – the ultras paraded with the cup, wearing T-shirts saying ‘We are legends’. Mr Enrich was in the middle of the ‘O’ of ‘Noi’ (‘we’). Not for the first time, the ultras were mythologizing not the team, but themselves.
The investigation into the drug-dealing was slow-moving. In June 2013 one of the Irriducibili, Toffolo, was kneecapped near Caffarella park. (He had already been kneecapped in August 2007 when men dressed as police officers shot him on his doorstep.) Most people assumed it was a warning to keep his mouth shut. Diabolik was arrested in October 2014, having been on the run for a month using a fake ID. Police tracked him down thanks to the delivery of a pizza to a remote address during a televised Lazio game in the Europa League. When they arrested him, they found in his hideout baseball bats, truncheons, axes, swords, a pistol, blank and live ammunition and telephone jammers. The Guardia di Finanza subsequ
ently estimated Diabolik’s accumulated, and now confiscated, wealth at €2.3 million. He had various bank accounts and owned two villas, three cars and company shares. Judges later described his criminal gang as ‘particularly fierce and dangerous’.
Over the following months and years, it became obvious that the Irriducibili were major drug-dealers in the Italian capital. On 27 September 2014 Toffolo was again arrested in possession of marijuana and cocaine. Then, on 11 August 2015, a fisherman was walking along the no man’s land between the railway, the ring-road and the river in northeast Rome. He glimpsed something unusual on the banks of the Aniene, a tributary of the Tiber. When he looked closer, he saw that it was a left foot. On it was a tattoo: ‘Today is a beautiful day to die, Irriducibili Lazio.’
Forensic tests suggested the foot had been severed using a chainsaw and then stored in a fridge. The tattoo made it easy to identify the victim. He was Gabriele Di Ponto, who had been missing since July. His had been a short, sad life. He had lost both parents aged five and had committed his first robbery aged eighteen because he had never eaten roast chicken. That’s the story he told his wife, an Italo-Tunisian to whom he had been married for six weeks until she left him because of his violence. Di Ponto had the word ‘Psycho’ tattooed around his belly button and a pistol inked on his left hip. He had a long criminal record for robbery and drug-dealing, and had only recently come out of prison. It was thought that he tried to start dealing again on his old turf, between Tor Sapienza and San Basilio, and used force with the wrong people. The rest of his body was never found and the investigation came to nothing.
Di Ponto was on the fringes of the Irriducibili but his murder, though unsolved, was further evidence that certain members of the ultra group doubled as wholesale drug-dealers. The irony was that Lazio’s Curva Nord was implacably opposed to any narcotics. Like many other terraces with far-right leanings, drug-use is scorned as the irresponsible stupidity of left-wing hippies and those without martial rigour.
