Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  1985, Cosenza

  By 1985 the Nuclei Sconvolti were holding their weekly meetings in Padre Fedele’s convent. Over the previous few years the Monk had become a well-known figure. He would sometimes lead the pre-match singing on the stadium’s PA system, or climb one of the floodlight poles and lead the chants from 30 metres above the curva. ‘I had become the king of Cosenza,’ he remembers.

  He would be photographed kissing the turf or, in the midst of the fans, wearing a red-and-blue hat and spinning a scarf over his head. On the morning of Sunday match days, he would even go, with Pastachina, to say mass for the players. His notoriety was such that Reggina, local rivals to Cosenza, once displayed a banner saying: ‘Tuo Padre Fedele, Tua Madre Mignotta’: ‘Your father is faithful [Fedele], your mother’s a whore.’

  The space in that convent meant that the Nuclei Sconvolti were able to store more material. Padre Fedele helped them with logistics too, lending them his van or his kitchen. It was an era in which ultras across the country were competing to perform the most memorable choreography. Ciccio and Piero wanted to create a red-and-blue flag that covered the whole of the main stand. They ordered 1,200 metres of material from a factory in Prato, 750 kilometres away. Tonino drove all the way to pick it up, piling the stuff in cardboard boxes. Piero’s mother was a seamstress, and he was good with a sewing machine too. He spent every spare minute in the convent, laboriously stitching the red to the blue, then the blue to the red.

  All week people dropped in, taking photos. Others helped lay the sewn stripes out flat, or went to find a sandwich for Piero. Someone found a couple of shopping trollies to pile it all into, as it was so heavy that no one could really carry it. The whole city knew about the bandierone, the ‘huge flag’. On the morning of Sunday 6 April 1985, all the lads laid the flag out flat in a car park. As they unrolled it, they couldn’t believe how big it was: 100 metres long and 20 wide. ‘It looks,’ said Paride, always the intellectual of the group, ‘like Gulliver’s scarf.’

  Once it was laid out flat, a gust of wind lifted up a corner and travelled obliquely all the way through the material like a wave, on and on through red-and-blue. The stoned ultras watched it in awe. The flag was alive. They rolled it up again, twenty of them carrying it to the back of Padre Fedele’s battered blue van.

  The ultras sat in the main stand that Sunday. It was a match against Catanzaro, the local rivals. Unevenly, the flag was pulled down over peoples’ heads, from the top of the tribuna to the bottom. As lads jumped in excitement underneath it, it seemed as if it was bouncing. Then those in the top row fired white confetti all over it, and it looked snow-frosted. Even though Cosenza won that derby 1–0, with a left-foot strike from a tight angle by Alberto Aita, people only spoke about the flag, about how an entire sector of the stadium had been turned red-and-blue.

  Two months later, on 5 June 1985, the Cosenza ultras opened up a soup kitchen for the poor. A local lawyer offered the Monk a ground-floor building on Via Mazzini, only a few metres from where Piero and Claudio lived. Although some of the ultras thought it was a waste of time, most were drawn to the idea, Piero especially. He was soon thinking about the menus, the seating, where to get the food. The curva and the foodbank seemed, to him, one and the same. Cooking food for those who were hungry was an irresistible madness, just like ultra fandom.

  He was a good cook, too. He loved mooching around the shops, trying to find ingredients and jovially knocking down their prices, bumping into friends in those shops and going for an early glass of wine. He enjoyed the dexterity required in the kitchen, the chance to listen to his favourite music – still The Clash, but also The Sound, Depeche Mode and U2 – as he rolled out the pastry.

  When the Nuclei Sconvolti first opened their soup kitchen, only three punters rolled up. But the next week there were seventeen. The additional volume of food wasn’t a problem – Padre Fedele could always press-gang people into giving. It was just that everyone came with a story that they were desperate to tell. Once food had been eaten, tools were downed and many ultras shot off back to their families or jobs. It was always Piero who hung around listening to people’s stories. He sat there until evening, inviting those homeless men and women into the kitchen to munch on leftovers as they told him their woes. Invariably he would persuade them to come to the stadium on Sunday, telling them that the terrace was the route to salvation.

  That summer, Padre Fedele and the Cosenza ultras organized the first national meeting of ultras. Through word-of-mouth, the ultras from Genoa, Atalanta, Reggio, Bari and beyond heard about the meeting. A debate was held in the Cinema Italia with the title ‘Leave the ghetto to create an ultra counterculture’. But more than merely being countercultural, the meeting was an attempt by Padre Fedele to publicize the fact that ultras were able to come together in peace. He had a slogan he repeated continuously: ‘Fandom yes, violence no. Peace.’ By coincidence, a journalist for La Repubblica was on holiday at a beach near Fuscaldo, and came over to see what the ultra gathering was about. His article gave it publicity and soon many other journalists came to interview the odd monk and his band of countercultural, charitable ultras.

  The photos from that gathering show just how young the ultras were. In the sunshine of the Silan mountains, those gathered around Padre Fedele are mostly in their late teens or early twenties. Those young men had begun to glimpse a different way of being ultras. ‘We were saying,’ remembers Luca, ‘lads, be careful of a war between us. The real enemy isn’t the person who is like you in another city but the institutions.’ The Cosenza ultras were, in their way, every bit as uncompromising as their counterparts in Verona, only their fury wasn’t aimed at outsiders but at overlords.

  1986

  Despite Padre Fedele’s best efforts, the violence continued. On 13 April 1986 a seventeen-year-old Roma supporter was burnt alive in a train carriage. Paolo Zappavigna, of the Roma Boys, had let off a smoke flare in the aftermath of Roma’s 4–2 away victory at Pisa but the flames caught the curtains. A gust of air from an open window meant that, within minutes, the whole carriage was ablaze. The fire extinguishers had already been robbed.

  A month later, in May, Geppo was arrested in Sardinia. He was accused of killing a German tourist in a hippie encampment called the Valle Della Luna. He was in prison for nearly a year, something he called an ‘insufferable hell’. He didn’t mix much with the other prisoners partly because most were Sardinians who spoke a dialect he barely understood.

  By the time Geppo came out it was as if his spark had gone. Now, you only got flashes of his optimism and enthusiasm. His heroin habit had turned him skeletal. He still had charm but he used it mostly to blag a few thousand lire from old friends like Bongi or Mortadella. He had turned inward, focussing on the needle and nothing else.

  When he finally got back to Rome, he discovered that the great unity of CUCS – bringing together all the Roma ultras under one banner – was disintegrating. The club had signed a former Lazio midfielder and the CUCS was bitterly divided over the issue. Things were on the slide. Roma – captained by Carlo Ancelotti and coached by Sven-Goran Eriksson – had just missed out on another scudetto, pipped to first place by Juventus.

  December 1986, Central African Republic

  Paride’s legs kept shaking. His forehead was resting on the hot glass of the bus but he was sweating so much that his head kept sliding down, his chin bouncing on his chest as he woke up. The bus was overcrowded, and it smelt of sweat and woodsmoke. There were people sitting in the aisles, some trying to lie down to sleep.

  Padre Fedele brusquely barged people out of the way as he brought a nun over to Paride. She looked at him, held his forehead and took his pulse. ‘He’s probably got malaria.’

  Paride smiled wearily. He had guessed as much. He tried to bring his knees up to his chest but there was no space. Everyone else was wearing T-shirts and he was covered in all the clothes he had but was still shivering. The nun said he needed Chloroquine and he went back to staring out of the windo
w.

  Paride had seen death close up now. In the last week he had witnessed the effects of leprosy and AIDS. Just the day before, Padre Fedele was weighing a tiny baby on the scales, so thin it looked like she would break. She just died there in that metal basin. And now he was ill, too, and the whole trip was becoming a blur: the flight from Lamezia to Zurich, and from Zurich to Bangui. In the airport he had seen well-dressed diamond merchants and missionaries. And then all those sheet-metal shacks for miles and miles. The only actual buildings were the ministerial palaces.

  It was Padre Fedele, of course, who had suggested this trip. He needed some strong men to load and unload clothes, shoes and provisions for the missionary stations in Bangassou and beyond. The Monk knew, too, that once the young men had seen this poor and archaic world, they would be affected by it. The Central African Republic in 1986 was so corrupt that there was no postal service because people stole the stamps. They had only 200 TV sets in the whole country. And yet it was also so devout that church services would go on all day, with people coming and going between those wooden pillars, bringing food and clapping, and raising their voices to the skies.

  Paride remembers on that first visit taking breakfast to one of the primary schools. As Piero was unloading the food, he had said to his mates: ‘This is worth more than one hundred Cosenza victories.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Drainpipe, appalled that there might be anything more important than that.

  Piero repeated it again, as he gave some bread to a little kid in a torn yellow T-shirt. Drainpipe and Paride nodded, knowing he was right. In these strange weeks, Padre Fedele was showing them what it meant to be ultra, to go beyond everything. Here they had the same long and uncomfortable journeys, bouncing along the dirt tracks, but when they arrived, they weren’t defending their scarves but giving them away.

  ‘This,’ Drainpipe had said, giving his red-and-blue scarf to a kid, ‘is very precious. You understand?’ And Drainpipe held it above his head, and the three ultras burst into song, making the kids all laugh.

  On that trip they saw another side to Padre Fedele too. They already knew he could be volcanic and he was true to form. When their bus ran out of petrol and the shrewd businessmen with containers by the side of the road tried to charge the Monk three times the usual rate, he screamed at them in his most vulgar Cosentino, lamenting their lack of support for his charitable mission. When people kept him waiting for hours, he would explode again, shouting in fury and frustration. But, like much of his behaviour, it was a bit of an act. He got wound up for effect and he calmed down as quickly as he heated up. But they saw how canny he could be. He had packed dozens of little calendars with photographs of himself with Pope John Paul II. Other than Diego Maradona and Bob Marley, John Paul II was the most famous man in Africa. The stone-faced soldiers at all the road-blocks always let them through when Padre Fedele showed them the photograph of himself smiling next to the Pope. He would point to his chest proudly, saying ‘that’s me’, and as he gave them the calendars they would drop their guns and raise the barriers.

  Those boys weren’t the same when they got home. It was as if they had discovered an aspect of being an ultra that went far deeper than football. It was still full of folly and risk, it was still a battle and an expedition onto foreign soil, but now it was real. They weren’t merely screaming encouragement to others but giving out food and clothes. Paride, once he had recovered from his illness, no longer felt like a provincial punk, an orphaned kid who liked to be provocative. He believed in something. Nothing religious – all three of the boys were full of scorn for the bourgeois Catholicism that surrounded them. But there was a new sense of awareness, of purpose. ‘I felt things,’ Paride says, ‘a calling which wasn’t born of nothing. And that solidarity was a profound, integral part of the ultra world.’

  ‘It had nothing to do with being an ultra’ – Drainpipe smiles at the memory, three decades on – ‘and everything to do with it.’

  1987, Drughi and Irriducibili

  Ultra groups were strangely like Italian political parties: they seemed to be constantly breaking up, reforming, finding new leaders and labels. In Bologna there were now the Forever Ultras, but also the Mods and Total Chaos. Fiorentina’s Forever Ultras had dissolved and now various groups were fighting for ascendency: Giovani della Fiesole, L’Alcool Campi and the Collettivo. Underneath and in between all those main groups were dozens more, all splintering, fighting, making up and coming back together (I once counted thirty-two different groups underwriting a communication from the overarching ‘Brescia 1911’ group).

  The reasons for splits were various. An Italian preponderance for scissionismo (‘schismatism’) was certainly one cause, as was the uncompromising nature of being an ultra. If your founding philosophy goes counter to conciliation and concession, it is inevitable that there will be internal disagreements. ‘You were constantly having to have an argument,’ one leader from the 1980s remembers. Although they were defined by lo scontro (‘the fight’), capo-ultras were also scontrosi (‘argumentative’ or, really, ‘looking for it’). The way of life was about being contro, permanently ‘against’ as well as beyond. So, after a dozen years on the frontline, it wasn’t surprising that a few of the founders were weary. They were close to thirty and many had settled down or descended into addiction or prison. Under incessant pressure from the police (now using helicopters, CCTV, intelligence and informants), many decided to semi-retire, often creating in time their own Vecchia Guardia group (the ‘old guard’).

  By the mid- to late 1980s a new generation of young radicals were fighting their own ultras for control of the centre of the curva. That fight for ascendancy wasn’t only because of clashing egos. Often rival groups had different political positions but the fight was also about money. Many groups had more than a thousand formal adherents. Control of the terraces implied control, also, of certain suburbs. It meant your group would have the monopoly in those quarters – on the dealing of tickets, memorabilia and, in some cases, narcotics. By then many clubs were giving ultra groups help with tickets, transport and storage. But various ultras began to see a business opening and, during the economic boom of the 1980s, the public had the spare cash to snap up inflated, touted tickets or imported powders.

  One teacher in Rome remembers asking all the children in her class what the students’ parents did for a living and one replied, ‘My father is an ultra.’ It had become, for the top echelons, a profession. One man who arranged a conference of ultras in the late 1980s was amazed to see that all the capo-ultras carried mobile phones (an absolute rarity then), which were constantly ringing. Those tough men had become go-to fixers.

  All sorts of fringe benefits were associated with dominance in the curva: the concessions to sell burgers, scarves or become a stadium parking attendant were often in the gift of ultras, who were becoming adept at exerting subtle pressure on the clubs. As ticket prices slowly increased, the ultras realized that a fan strike could cost the club millions of lire in lost revenue. For men who were so easily provoked into fights, finding a pretext for that protest was never difficult. Urban riots, too, were becoming so common that damage to the cars or businesses of club presidents was easy enough to arrange.

  The terraces of Juventus and Lazio led the way in this commercialization. By 1987, a decade after its foundation, the Fighters were on the wane. Beppe Rossi was by then battling a drug habit and his group had been caught up in violent clashes against Fiorentina fans. The group decided to fold.

  Then, on 27 September 1987, in a game between Juventus and Pescara, a new banner appeared. In white letters on a black background, it said ‘Arancia Meccanica’ (‘A Clockwork Orange’). The police objected to the implication of violence in the title and tried to ban it. But at the next game the ultras cut the letters out, sewed zips on, stuffed one letter down each of their pants, then smuggled the banner into the stadium and zipped it back together.

  To save the hassle, they decided to change the name to
Droogs, the raping-and-killing characters from Anthony Burgess’s novel. But in the aftermath of Heysel, even that invented word sounded too English to the Juventus ultras, so they turned it into Drughi. Their symbol was a tricolour circle containing the silhouettes of four bowler-hatted brutes with batons. The head of the Drughi, and the man who insisted on the Italianization of the group’s name, was the Juventus ultra from Foggia, Pino Coldheart.

  Something similar happened at Lazio. The 1980s had been dark years for Lazio. They had been relegated to Serie B in the aftermath of a betting scandal. The beloved Giorgio Chinaglia had returned from America – where he had played with Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer for the New York Cosmos – to become President of the club, full of promise and hope. His tenure was embarrassingly chaotic and the club only avoided relegation on the last day of the season against Pisa. Giorgio Chinaglia fled back to the States.

  Whilst Roma had been winning the scudetto and reaching European Cup finals, Lazio had been playing provincial teams. It was a club that seemed, according to fan and writer Maurizio Martucci, ‘cursed and melancholic’. Every ultra, though, knows that sporting failure hones the terraces: relegation and disappointment clears away the fair-weather supporters, leaving only the loyal rump of purists.

  By then there were dozens of ultra groups on the Lazio terraces: Falange, Hell’s Eagles Destroyers, Eagles Korps, Gruppo Sconvolti, the Deranged Group and Eagles Girls. As well as the Eagles, there were the Vikings, which had always been a more explicitly far-right outfit. The Nazis’ double-edged axe was one of its symbols, as was the old Mussolinian motto, ‘molti nemici, molto onore’ (‘many enemies, much honour’).