Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  The vast majority of Italian ultras, however, don’t recognize the Irriducibili as an ultra group at all. It says a lot about the purist conception of what an ultra is that the criticism of the Irriducibili from other ultras centres neither on drug-dealing (outside the far-right terraces, many are anti-prohibitionists), nor on the political extremism (which is so widespread on the terraces) but on the one aspect that society considers normal and legitimate: the profiteering. It’s the monetization of fandom, the exploitation of the terraces to make millions, which most ultras find heretical. They see the Irriducibili as no more representative of the ultra mentality than Rockefeller is of communism.

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  The theoretician of group dynamics, Bruce Tuckman, once came up with a quartet of rhyming phases through which all groups usually pass: forming, storming, norming and performing. Years later, a fifth was added: mourning (also called adjourning or transforming). In many ways it seems that the ultra movement is in this last stage, not just grieving the departed ultras but also, in some ways, the end of the movement itself. Many old hands say that what passes for an ultra now is so far removed from the original version as to be unrecognizable. Being an ultra is not, like football, a game any more. Too much is at stake. Teenage tearaways have been replaced by middle-aged men, the carefree by the calculating, chaos by order, insurgency by tradition. A movement that once empowered the penniless is now bossed by rich, autocratic capi.

  One of the most poignant interviews I did for this book was with a semi-retired ultra, now in his late fifties, in his attic. There he had a miniature football stadium, the size of a pool table, for Subbuteo tournaments with friends. Every detail – the advertising hoardings, the scoreboard, the shirts – devoutly recreated the 1970s. ‘This is the football from when I was little,’ he said wistfully. ‘Now it’s all finished.’ Perhaps that, too, is a reason for the melancholia of ageing ultras. Not just that the movement has changed, but that the times have too. Football is a reminder, as one ultra memoir put it, of ‘days which won’t return, days in which we were happy’.

  Some ultras decided they wanted to recapture the simplicity of the old days. They just wanted to play again, or at least – if they were a bit long in the tooth – set up football clubs where kids could have a kick-around. Disillusioned with industrialized football, they founded new clubs. Various Cosenza ultras created Brutium Cosenza in January 2011 as a protest against ‘racism, corruption, business and gratuitous violence’. Ovidiana Sulmona was founded in 2014 by ultras from Sulmona, the town in Abruzzo where Ovid was born. There were also Atletico San Lorenzo Roma, Stella Rossa Napoli and Ideale Bari Calcio. These clubs seemed to recapture the simple fun of sport (one team was called ‘Lebowski’ after the cult stoner film). ‘Despite the sparkling football of Serie A,’ the founders of Lebowski said, ‘we were tired of seasons without surprises.’ Many of these new clubs were self-financing. It cost twenty euros to join Palermo’s ‘Calcio Popolare’. Their ideals sounded almost identical to what the ultras were hoping to do way back in the late 1960s: ‘We will bring belonging to our city and attachment to the shirt on the pitch. We will bring pranks, warmth, passion and rivers of beer, because popular football belongs to the people.’

  For many, these new associations were a way to return football to its origins. RFC Lions Ska in Caserta was actively trying to bring locals, refugees and asylum-seekers together. The San Precario (‘Saint Uncertain’) club was founded in Padua in 2007 with similar aims (their slogan captured that sense of idling in the face of nastiness: ‘Playing against racism’).

  Alessio Abram was among those who decided to take the game back to the grassroots. Throughout the 1990s he had been one of the leaders of Ancona’s terraces. Short, with thick black hair, he was the opposite of the caricature of many ultras: not only was his ideological home the autonomous left, he also had Jewish ancestry. (The notoriously far-right Ascoli fans once held up a banner, in response to Ancona’s Cuban flag, saying ‘Your Head-Ultra is a Jew’.)

  He was one of the many far-left agitators who saw the ultra world as a place of countercultural rage and energy. He felt that sport was a rare means to bring people together to fight, rather than reinforce, prejudice. The Ancona ultras were active within the Ultra Resistance movement and in 2001 Abram began bringing people together informally to work out in a gym and play football. So many people got involved that a year later, he and friends organized a ‘Mundialito’, a multicultural ‘World Cup’ for all the immigrants living in and around Ancona. It was awarded a prize by FARE (‘Football Against Racism in Europe’) and in 2003 Abram decided to take it a step further and found a sports club.

  It was originally called Assata Shakur (after the American civil rights activist – or criminal, depending on your point of view – who has lived in exile in Cuba for the last thirty years). A local branch of the Italian FA objected to the name and it was changed to Konlassata (because so many activists complained that they were happy with the name as it was, ‘con l’Assata’). Its symbol was a white hand shaking a black hand in front of a football. The slogan was simple: ‘Who loves sport, hates racism’. None of it felt like a departure from the ultra movement but simply its continuation. A T-shirt you often see in the Ancona stands says bluntly ‘Racism divides’.

  Abram never pretended to be a saint. He saw the ultras as ‘the armed part of social resistance’. He received various stadium bans and because one ban was outstanding, Abram’s presence in the Konlassata club was considered an infringement of his restriction order. He was arrested and spent eighteen months in prison, and over a year under house arrest. There were major protests in the city and banners in the terraces. It felt, as with Claudio’s arrest in Cosenza, completely stupid. It often seemed to the minority – but nonetheless sizeable – contingent of left-leaning ultras as if they were being punished far more heavily than those on the far-right who committed more serious crimes.

  In prison, Abram felt like a political prisoner. ‘You wonder why you’re there,’ he says, now released. ‘You don’t understand why you’re inside and what you’re paying for. But that gives you strength: obviously I’ve done something right.’ Unlike many prisoners who are adamant that they don’t belong there, Abram is actually accepting. ‘Sure, there were grounds for me being there. I just said that maybe’ – he smiles – ‘I was paying too much.’

  Both political wings of the movement are united in the conviction that ultras are treated differently to every other citizen. Someone who escapes from prison is given an additional six months of detention when caught; an ultra who fails to sign in at the police station on match day can be sentenced to three years. Lorenzo Contucci, both a lawyer and a Roma ultra, says ‘the stadium has become an extraterritorial space, less for the behaviour than for the laws which are applied there. In the street, throwing a dangerous object is punished with a minimal fine; if the same gesture happens even outside the stadium but in a sporting context, the punishment is from one to four years.’

  All civil rights movements are initially dismissed by the mainstream, meeting with responses that vary from negation (‘things aren’t that bad’) to celebration (‘you had it coming’). It’s particularly difficult for ultras to argue that they’re the victims of institutional discrimination when, for decades, they’ve seemed to revel in the scorn that they’ve provoked. But there is something dangerously dictatorial, they say, about legal measures that the Italian state has adopted. On the terraces there are many university lecturers and lawyers and they have begun to pick apart how police now act as judges. Even though Article 27 of the Italian constitution says that ‘the accused isn’t considered guilty until a definitive conviction’, a Daspo can be imposed by a chief of police – the Questore – without trial. Even preventative measures against suspected mafiosi, says Contucci, have to come before a judge, not a police officer. A Daspo can stop you going to games and force you to sign in at the police station twice during matches, for up to eight years. As one Milan banner once wro
te: ‘A punch on the pitch – banned for 8 games; a punch on the terraces – 8 years. Disgrace.’

  It would take immense naivety to imagine that the system isn’t open to abuse, especially since the police are the enemy of the ultras and might be looking to settle scores. A Daspo can be issued for not sitting in an allocated seat (nobody does) or for lighting a sparkler. One can receive a Daspo simply for wearing a T-shirt, or singing a song, considered to be seditious. There are ‘group daspos’, in which the entire passengers on, say, a coach can be banned from games because of the behaviour, or luggage, of a single fellow traveller. It’s obvious that if police want to dismantle a group that is politically or ideologically inconvenient, the means are at their disposal. The measure can even be preventative, issued if there’s the perception that someone could cause trouble.

  The numbers involved are pretty astonishing. In one section of one comparatively small city (Cosenza’s Curva Sud) there were, at the last count, 145 Daspo-ed fans. Nationally, the number varies but it is between four and six thousand fans. It’s a form of martial law, the ultras say, that is being tried out on society’s scapegoats and could easily be rolled out for other black sheep, be they drug-addicts, agitators, protestors or immigrants. As one banner from the Viareggio ultras said: ‘Special laws: today for the ultras, tomorrow for the whole city.’

  Hence the repeated lament of modern ultras that they’re facing repression. It’s not just the miserable crowd-control where everyone is filmed, barcoded and kettled. There are pointless truncheonings, arrogant rough-handlings and the deliberate detention of fans so that they miss long periods of the actual match. The main gripe is that, according to another human-rights lawyer, Giovanni Adami, 60 per cent of fans are cleared of their offence once they’ve already served the sentence.

  So, in some ways ultras have reinvented themselves as spokespeople for fans’ rights: for cheaper tickets, more amenable match times and for the demilitarization of policing. No longer immoral iconoclasts, the ultras now present themselves as the guardians of an older, more innocent football, or else the least unethical element of it. ‘If you look,’ says Abram, ‘at everything Italian football has produced – match-fixing, doping and so on – are we really convinced that the ultras are the baddies?’ It’s a line you hear repeatedly and see held up in banners at every other game: ‘All straight things lie,’ said a banner of the Pescaresi, ‘every truth is a… curve.’

  *

  On 25 November 2014 investigators made a breakthrough in their search for links between the Juventus ultras and organized crime. Andrea Puntorno, the thirty-nine-year-old Sicilian boss of the Bravi Ragazzi, was arrested for importing heroin and cocaine from Sicily and Albania. Despite his many houses and cars, between 2004 and 2011 Puntorno had only declared an income of €2,600 per annum. Soon after his arrest, his wife was threatened by men who had, it seems, been investors in the ticket-touting scheme. Now that Puntorno was inside, they wanted their money back. The woman’s car was burnt and, after constant harassment, she decided to turn state’s witness, revealing everything she knew about the touting operation. She confirmed what investigators had long suspected: that professional criminals were using ultra groups to add interest to their cash through ticket-touting.

  Whether those investigators tipped off the Juventus hierarchy is unknown but by late 2014, it seems that Juventus was aware that they had allowed wolves into the building and that more were trying to get in. The club had been pressured to give building work at the new stadium to particular builders in order to avoid vandalism and the intimidation of workers. Andrea Angelli nobly resisted the intimidation but could surely read all the signs. In discussion with his childhood friend, his security manager Alessandro D’Angelo, Agnelli was heard by investigators talking about his concerns regarding one capo-ultra, the head of the Vikings, Loris Grancini. ‘The problem is,’ says Agnelli, ‘he has killed people.’ His friend corrects him: ‘He commissioned a killing.’ (Grancini is currently in prison, having been convicted of attempted murder.)

  From San Severo, Ciccio Bucci was trying to plot his comeback and, in November 2014, called Alessandro D’Angelo. He alluded, albeit in typically veiled terms, to Rocco Dominello’s Mafia links. Bucci called Dominello ‘that type of person’.

  ‘Ah, OK,’ said D’Angelo.

  ‘Only at that point,’ commented the Public Prosecutor in the subsequent arrest warrant for Rocco and Saverio Dominello, ‘does D’Angelo seem to understand.’

  So, throughout that 2014–15 season Juventus was trying to disinfest its dealings with the ultras. Perhaps nudged by the police and the secret services, for whom Bucci was an occasional informant, the club decided that Bucci was one of the few straight ultras with whom they could still do business. The commercial director of the club, Francesco Calvo, said that Bucci was a man who ‘inspired empathy’. The club’s elderly lawyer, Andrea Galassi, told me he was ‘a simple, sunny, enthusiastic, clean guy’.

  A plan was hatched to give Bucci an official role, to use him as a barrier between dark forces and the decorated football club. He would work alongside the club’s SLO (supporter liaison officer), negotiating with the ultras who had, effectively, expelled him. It would turn him from a poacher to a gamekeeper. From down South, Bucci phoned D’Angelo to pitch how he would work with the ultras. ‘The goose can continue to lay the golden egg,’ he said cryptically, ‘but a bit of water needs to get in.’ He was offering to wash off the dirt, or maybe even water down, the ‘compromise’ whereby Juventus had a safe stadium and the ultras made their millions.

  By the start of the 2015–16 season, Ciccio Bucci was back in Turin. His exile down South was over and it seemed that his childhood dream had come true. He was working for the club he had always loved. The last time the club’s lawyer saw Bucci, on the occasion of the Torino–Juventus derby in March 2016, he received an enthusiastic hug. ‘I’m an official figure,’ Bucci had said, beaming happily. All the years of hustling, of sourcing and slinging tickets, were over. He had a proper job.

  The trouble was that he had, in his words, ‘a foot in both rivers’. He was aiming to satisfy the demands of Juventus, the ordinary fans, various ultra groups and even the police (‘They call me every day,’ he complained). Like in his school days, he was trying to be friends with everyone. His old mates, the Drughi, didn’t want any watering down of the compromise, and he was ostracized and branded a traitor to the cause. Whilst his dream of working for Juventus had come true, after a year it was no longer quite so charming. He would always peer into a bar to see who was there before going in. He would look over his shoulder when walking the streets late at night. He knew that he was a target. In the spring of 2016 his mother died and he felt more alone than ever.

  On 1 July 2016 Rocco and Saverio Dominello, and thirteen others, were arrested for a variety of Mafia-related crimes. On 6 July Bucci was questioned as ‘a witness to the facts’. That night, he phoned his ex-wife and she felt that he was jabbering and barely making sense. He apologized to her and their son for any ‘lack of respect’. She didn’t understand and Bucci could only say that he was ‘totally paranoid’. It’s possible that he felt responsible for the arrest of the mafiosi, and was sure there would be reprisals. At the very least, he thought, the club he loved, Juventus, would sack him. He kept saying to his wife that he would have to sell his house. He would have no income any more.

  Nobody knows what exactly happened in the next few hours. It seems highly likely that Bucci – given the bruises to the side of his head and the organic material found on his sunglasses – had been roughed up. The Italian press later speculated that his son had been threatened and that the crime of ‘instigation to suicide’ had been committed.

  On 7 July, after watering his ex-wife’s plants, Bucci parked his car on that long viaduct on the way back to Turin. Two workmen witnessed him get out of the car and stand on the edge of the road. He acted alone. But as he stood there, Bucci must surely have blamed others for what he was about to
do. He had been shunned and beaten. Maybe he knew that all corrupt societies seek a scapegoat to cleanse themselves of their sins, and it was his shit luck to be that goat.

  After his death, there were no loose ends. The server on which phone-taps were recorded was wiped between 10.38 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. on the day of his death, meaning that there was no record of who had been in contact with Bucci in those crucial hours. The small bag from which he was inseparable was missing, and was only later returned to Bucci’s ex-wife by Juventus staff. It was almost as if all traces needed to be erased. When I spoke to someone within the club hierarchy to ask how Juventus was dealing with the death, he smiled ruefully: ‘In silence.’

  Many within the club, however, and the vast majority of Juventus supporters, were convinced that the Faustian pact between the Juventus ticket office and its ultras was operating elsewhere. Probably every big club had a similar quid pro quo in which tickets were illicitly slid under the counter to ultras in return for the ultras agreeing to suspend their instinct for insurgency. One Napoli director said that it had been standard procedure at the club to supply hundreds of tickets to fans for ‘over twenty years’. That’s just the way it was. A famous lawyer in Turin, who has represented both Juventus and ultra leaders, told me that ‘the compromise between Juventus and the ultras was simply the compromise between the rules and the realities’. It sounds uncannily like a metaphor for Italian life.

  Present Day: Livorno v. Cosenza

  It’s the first game since fifty-five ultras from the Curva Sud were given a stadium ban, so all the banners are hung upside down. A large, spray-painted portrait of Francesco, who has just died, is taped up on the plexiglass. Many of the chants are defiant: ‘The mistrusted are always present’ and ‘You’ll never have us as you want us’. A few minutes into the first half, a paper banner is unrolled. Twenty metres long, it says: ‘You’ve done nothing to us.’