Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  ‘Stefano,’ his mother said, ‘was the only focus of my life… I had only him.’ In pursuing a legal case against the policemen who had beaten him up, she received threats, including one written on her son’s tomb. She was offered money to drop the case but fought on even though justice was illusory. The one policeman found guilty was given a one-year suspended sentence. He left the force to become a body-builder and fitness trainer.

  The familiar face of Stefano Furlan – with his long hair and half-shut eye – has become emblematic in the ultras’ denunciation of police violence. His is a name always used when the ultras complain that the forces of order are just as violent as they are, and yet enjoy impunity. The Curva Nord of Triestina’s new stadium, the Nereo Rocco, is named after Furlan.

  In those years, the ultras’ hatred for the ‘forces of order’ began to surpass their loathing for rival fans. The disparaging slang – i blu (‘the blue’), la sbirraglia (‘the cops’) – was a sign that the ultras, for all their differences and mutual animosity, could unite around insulting police and Carabinieri. It was now a three-way fight, but the third element – uniformed, armed with tear gas and truncheons – had an unfair advantage. The ultras hated the impunity of the police. Their righteous anger was often understandable, but the continual de-legitimization of the police encouraged overlaps between organized crime and certain ultras. Their outlaw insistence on omertà towards all authority meant that there were now anthropological similarities between teenage rebels and professional criminals. ‘When one ended up in the clink,’ one young Juventus ultra remembers, ‘the only thought was omertà.’

  Later that year another death revealed how violent the inter-club rivalries were becoming. In September 1984 Marco Fonghessi, from Cremona, was stabbed to death by a man from Milan’s Red-and-Black Brigades.

  *

  The Romanisti were convinced that 1984 was the year they would win the European Cup. They had Agostino Di Bartolomei, Falcão, Pruzzo… and the final was being played against Liverpool in their own city. Legend has it that, after Roma lost 2–0 against Dundee United in Scotland, officials from Roma tried to bribe the referee, Michel Vautrot, in order to win the return leg. Roma won 3–0. (The son of the club’s president, years later, admitted the truth of the accusation.)

  There were such serious fights between Roma supporters at the offices selling tickets to the final with Liverpool in May 1984 that police were called in. Pitched battles followed. Cobbles were ripped up and thrown, knives flashed, batons used.

  One of the Roman lads, Alessio, used to go on holiday to Calabria and knew Ciccio, Luca and Paride. He sold them his spare tickets. There had always been links between Cosenza and Roma. Lello had started it and then many of the Calabrians had gone to support Roma against their hated Calabrian cousins, Catanzaro, the year before (a game abandoned because of disturbances). At Catanzaro they had met Geppo.

  When the Cosenza boys arrived in the capital it was covered with red-and-yellow. Balconies, shop windows, statues – everything was given a scarf, a sticker, a flag. It felt like you were making history just being there. In Piazza del Popolo there were fights with Liverpool supporters. The Scousers chanted in favour of Roma’s hated rivals Lazio, so the Romanisti sang for Everton, Liverpool’s local nemesis. There were punches but it was too beery for the fights to be more than a few windmills, and the police soon pulled them apart. Ambulances and police trucks raced in all directions.

  The fact that the game was against Liverpool made it even more meaningful for the ultras. The torch of fanaticism had been passed from Liverpool to Roma, with Bongi and his mates borrowing ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ and ‘When the Saints…’ That torch had in turn been passed to Cosenza. So, for nineteen-year-old Ciccio and his ‘mad band’ to see both sets of fanatics up against each other was exhilarating. It didn’t disappoint. The English pulled their scarves taut and sang ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, and in return the Romans gave them the whole arsenal: ‘Ahi, ahi, ahi, ahi, magic Roma, my heart is sad when it’s far from you’, to the tune of ‘Cielito Lindo’. Then the usual one about raising the flags to the heavens to the tune of Gene Autrey’s ‘That Silver-haired Daddy of Mine’. For hours before the game it was, as well as a series of fights, a giant sing-off.

  The Romanisti were convinced that they couldn’t lose, least of all on the pitch. But it ended in a draw and went to penalties. In front of a nervous south end, the Liverpool goalkeeper Bruce Grobelaar did his famous wobbly legs routine, pretending to be nervous, and two Roma penalty-takers fluffed it. Liverpool had won. As Liverpool players lifted the cup and their fans celebrated and sang, the Curva Sud was silent. Many didn’t move for an hour or more. Most were crying. Lorenzo – then only eighteen and now a lawyer busy defending ultras in court – says he didn’t speak a full sentence for a month.

  That final, though, was equally notable for what happened on the fringes of the game. Agostino Di Bartolomei was incandescent with rage, allegedly throwing a shoe in the changing rooms at Falcão because the Brazilian hadn’t stepped up to take a penalty. Their bust-up would eventually lead to Di Bartolomei being sold to Milan. Also in that famous match, the banner of the Boys made its reappearance. Various young toughs were longing to bring a bit of discipline and warrior spirit back to the Curva Sud. That night, dozens of Liverpool supporters were knifed, creating amongst them a hatred of Italians that would cause carnage at the following year’s European Cup Final at Heysel.

  By then, it was becoming clear that the attempt to maintain the Curva Sud as an apolitical zone was failing. Old and new groups were breaking the consensus, with the Guerillas bleeding into another group called Opposing Faction. They were meeting in the basement of a church in Via Gallia under the leadership of a man called Rommel. It wasn’t long before many Roma ultras were singing that their team was ‘the pride of Roman youth’ to the tune of the old fascist favourite, ‘Little Black Face’ (a 1935 song about a black Ethiopian girl rescued by Italian colonizers in Ethiopia).

  *

  Drugs and ultras were becoming increasingly interconnected. Throughout the 1970s a large proportion of ultras had enjoyed smoking canne (‘canes’). On the terraces, balsamic gusts of weed mixed with smoke flares and cigarettes. The names chosen for new groups now came not from political engagement or even from martial prowess but from defiant substance abuse. It was all about, they said, the ‘buzz’.

  One ultra memoir, written by two members of Spal’s Gruppo d’Azione, wearily remembers an away game as ‘the usual delirious journey involving alcohol and various drugs’. On trains, they would often nick the little red hammers meant for smashing windows in an emergency in order to raid chemists for various pharmaceuticals: Valium, Darkene, Rohypnol.

  By the mid-1980s the roles and the drugs were changing. Carefree bohemianism was getting darker and ultras were no longer just consumers but dealers too. The zona franca of the curve was the ideal location to sling. It was almost impossible to get busted in that mass of hostile humanity. Often on the terraces you would have a man with a bulging money belt, taking notes from fans in return for wraps of green or white. It’s still the same today.

  For many ultras, drug use was becoming habitual rather than recreational. Many became dealers to pay for their hits. Nino was one of the leaders of Inter’s Vikings group. He had a cheeky-boy face and front teeth so short that most of his smile came out at the sides. But you could tell he lived on the edge: he had a boxer’s nose, a short zig-zag scar from the left corner of his mouth and another scar across the bottom of his rib cage, as if a sad-face symbol had been carved on his paunch. The symbol of his group was the labrys, the two-headed axe that had always been an icon for the far right.

  Nino had become a coke fiend and was buying the gear wholesale to sell on street corners. Much of the ultra way of life was about territorial conquest. It was the same, Nino found, in dealing: you had to conquer your corner and defend it fiercely. The fact that many of the rival dealers
were black immigrants only made the fight, for Nino – with his ‘honour and loyalty’ T-shirts – more compelling.

  Once, he needed to conquer the park in Baranzate, in the northwest of Milan. He went there on his motorbike with an ultra friend. Approaching the Liberian dealers without taking off his helmet, he shot one in both legs and, placing the warm gun on his neck, said he would kill him if he ever saw him dealing there again. That shooting put a few more ivy leaf tattoos on Nino’s left arm, each one representing a year spent in prison. But at least people knew not to mess with him.

  One of the cities most affected by the flood of heroin was Verona. The wealthy city was at a crossroads of motorways, the A4 and A22, so it became a nexus for wholesale deals and was nicknamed ‘the Bangkok of Italy’. Amongst the ultras of Hellas Verona, there was also a rather British attitude towards alcohol abuse. As one writer put it, they enjoyed ‘an excessive use of every type of alcohol: wine, beer, digestifs, grappa…’ The Verona ultras liked their players as tough and uncompromising as they were. Their hero was Gianfranco Zigoni, a feisty, fearless player known as much for his sendings-off as his goals.

  Verona’s main ultra group was the Brigate Gialloblù, founded in November 1971. Its motif had a three-runged yellow ladder between the two words (the team were known as the ‘scaligeri’ because the Scala family had ruled the city in the Middle Ages). There were also many other satellite groups: Verona Front, Rude Boys, Provos and, naturally, Hellas Alcool. The Veronesi were, more than any other curva, considered very Anglophile, partly because there was a ‘London Shop’ in the city but also because a Scot, Joe Jordan, signed for the club in the 1983–84 season. There was even an ultra group called the Tartan Army. Many other groups had English names, like The Deadly Sinners Club. At most Hellas Verona games, Union Jacks were waved. The ‘Butei’ – dialect for ‘lads’ – were even twinned with notorious Chelsea hooligans and followed the English practice of leaving calling cards on rival ultras they had beaten up: ‘Well done,’ said the card, ‘you’ve just met the yellow-blue brigades.’ Typical of this irreverent, violent form of fandom was the ASU group, the ‘Association of Humans of the Barn’. They had violent initiation ceremonies, enjoyed headbutt challenges and sang, ‘If you don’t know us, get out of the way, we dirty everywhere’ or ‘We are evils’. (The English deployed by the ultras was often deliberately pidgin, almost as if they wanted to point up their own illiteracy or provincialism.)

  The Veronesi were grudgingly respected throughout the ultra world not only because they always went looking for violence, but because they incarnated something called goliardia. It’s a term repeatedly used by ultras to describe the bohemian, slap-stick silliness of the ultra way of life. The Veronesi took parasols or beach mats to games to suggest it would be as relaxing as the beach. They wore quartered yellow-and-blue suits, or tuxedos, or yellow building-site helmets. One time, against Udinese when they won 5–3, they threw carrots instead of stones, singing ‘buon appetito’.

  That playfulness was reflected in their songs. ‘We are afflicted by a violent mentality,’ they sang. The football was important to some but usually incidental to the fights before or after the games: ‘We don’t give a fuck about this game’ said one banner. When it came to those fights, however, the Veronesi prepared with military precision. During a game against Milan, when the fog was so thick that visibility was reduced to a few metres, two thousand Veronesi managed to creep up on the Milanese ultras in complete silence. But it was rarely playful. In 1977 a hand grenade was thrown onto the side of the pitch and the Italian press started comparing the city less to Bangkok than to Beirut (then consumed by a vicious civil war). Every Verona game was accompanied by urban warfare: shops smashed up, cars rolled, rival ultras battered, fires started.

  Sometimes the hatred was mixed with irony. ‘Don’t be racist,’ said one sticker, ‘hate everyone.’ And often the disdain was aimed not at foreigners but at anyone from the South: ‘From the Po downward, there’s no more Italy.’ But it was getting less amusing every year and younger elements were moving in with a more extreme agenda. Celtic crosses – a perennial symbol of Italy’s far right – were combined with ‘Sieg Heil’ chants. One of the major ultra groups in the mid-1980s was the Verona Front (created by adherents of the MSI party’s youth wing). Bananas were thrown at black players and, in May 1983, the first of many swastikas appeared amongst the other banners.

  Some felt the first appearance of a swastika in the curva wasn’t dissimilar to the way English punks occasionally used them. When, in December 1977, Time Out asked a punk why she wore a swastika, she replied that ‘punks just like to be hated’. And there was, after all, a Verona group called the ‘Punk Brigade’. A generous observer might have hoped that there was as much self-hatred as hatred towards others in that grim gesture on the Verona terraces.

  But it was very clear that Verona’s ultras were becoming ever more right-wing. It was a city often unrepentantly loyal to Mussolini. During the Second World War it had been the base for the Gestapo’s General Command and it repeatedly produced extremist groups in the post-war era, like Rosa dei Venti, Fronte Nazionale and Ludwig (the latter a label for two Nazi-inspired serial killers, Marco Furlan and Wolfgang Abel, who are thought to have killed more than two dozen people. ‘Our faith is Nazism,’ they once said, ‘our justice is death.’).

  Verona football club was slowly becoming a dark place. Even one of the admiring chroniclers of the curva wrote that ‘with deplorable cynicism players or managers hit by misfortune or personal tragedies were targeted; those who had separated from their wives or who had physical defects. With the arrival of the first black players in the Italian championships, the fury and bad taste became greater…’ Often the Veronesi laughed off the outrage at their Nazi iconographies. Like most ultras, they wanted to provoke and outrage, and knew that the swastika was the ideal emblem for that purpose. But for some of them it was a genuine political creed and one that was spreading through many terraces. Long gone were the days in which most ultra groups were inspired by the far left. By the mid-1980s it seemed much more radical and extremist – always ultra obsessions – to align with the far right.

  But in 1985 no one cared too much about a few cretins flaunting Nazi symbolism on the Verona terraces because football had produced another miracle. On 11 May Hellas Verona won the Serie A championship. It was one of those rare occasions in which an absolute underdog not only came out on top but added to the folklore of the national sport. The icon of that Verona team was a Dane, Preben Elkjær Larsen. Of his many nicknames – ‘Mayor’, ‘Mad Horse’, ‘Buffalo’ – the one that stuck recalled his goal against Juventus when he ran half the length of the pitch with only one boot: ‘Cinderello’.

  That month, though, also showed the horror that football can cause. Fifty-six people died in a fire at Bradford City’s Valley Parade stadium. A few weeks later, in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel, in Belgium, thirty-nine people lost their lives, thirty-four of them Italian. A charge by Liverpool hooligans caused the Juventus fans to rush away, creating such a dense crush that a wall collapsed. In an act of both practicality and devotion, many of the dead were covered, and carried away, wrapped in Juventus flags. ‘It was a shame that had to be washed, in ultra ethics, with blood,’ wrote one Juventus ultra.

  Beppe Rossi, the leader of the Juventus Fighters, was never the same after Heysel. His whole career on the terraces had been based on admiration for and imitation of the English fans, especially those of Liverpool. Now, in creating the panic that caused the deaths of so many fans, they were responsible for slaughtering his brothers. Many Juventus ultras felt guilty that they were far from the action when it kicked off (they had requested seats in the opposite terrace to increase their allocation) and were unable to defend the ordinary members of the public in the infamous Sector Z.

  Rossi, like so many on the terraces, began to find consolation in the needle. But Heysel also marked one of the first occasions in w
hich the ethics of the ultras, paradoxically, appeared more noble than that of the sportsmen. The idea that a game could be played immediately after so many deaths appalled those on the terraces. Certain fans had talked to the players, even going to the changing rooms to clarify exactly what had happened, but the show had to go on. The Juventus players’ celebrations at their victory were even more galling. That dark night in Belgium marked the beginning of a cleaving apart of players and ultras, not just amongst Juventus fans but across the country. Players were no longer considered heroic or representative of their fans in any meaningful way. If that profound role – of heroically representing the people – no longer belonged to the players, it was one that the ultras would claim for themselves.

  There was another regrettable but understandable consequence of Heysel: a return to the fascist-era hatred of the English. An old Mussolini maxim – ‘God curse the English’ – was now endlessly repeated and surpassed by far stronger insults. The tragedy was still an excuse to insult Juventini (‘minus thirty-nine’ was a regular chant by their rivals) but it was also a pretext to Italianize fandom. For Juventus – the most popular team in Italy – Heysel closed the door on supporters’ cosmopolitanism, with the result that the tricolour, and the far right, were nudged towards the frontline there and on many terraces.

  But the creep towards the far right was also happening because new groups were emerging from within the same terraces. If one major group had dominated the terraces of each club in the 1970s, throughout the 1980s a rival one usually emerged. In Turin a group calling itself the Granata Korps came to the fore. (The use of Korps – a German military unit and usually associated, in the minds of the ultras, with Rommel’s Afrika Korps – left few in any doubt as to their political leanings.) In 1982 Bologna’s Mods were created, largely by dissidents from the city’s Forever Ultras. There were many reasons for the emergence of these new groups – personality clashes, different notions of what being an ultra implied – but many major groups founded in the 1980s emerged in opposition to the generally far-left ethos of those that had emerged in the 1970s.