Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  *

  Because of its deliberately devil-may-care culture, the ultra world had always been dangerous. But invariably the loss of life had seemed incidental rather than deliberately intended. It was just that, in the reckless chaos of fights and smashing Molotovs and flashing knives, there were victims along the way. In some ways, it was almost surprising that so few people died. But something changed in the mid-1990s. Now certain ultras seemed to be actually taking aim. On 30 January 1994 a twenty-two-year-old man called Salvatore Moschella was bundled out of (or allegedly jumped from) the window of a moving train after threats and beatings by ultras from Messina. The Messina club president said of his ultras, ‘For me they will always remain good lads.’

  Three years later, in the summer of 1997, Abdellah Doumi was hanging around Turin’s murazzi, the walls and wharfs on the western bank of Turin’s section of the river Po. Doumi was a twenty-four-year-old Moroccan immigrant from Casablanca. He had learnt enough Italian to break the ice with passers-by. But certain drinkers didn’t want ice broken by foreigners. Various men from Toro’s Granata Korps – including a man nicknamed Yeti, with a dog called Adolf – surrounded Doumi. The water was there, right next to them, silent and dark. It seemed almost unavoidable now. The men formed a line instead of a circle, just like they did in terrace rucks, raising their hands and insulting the enemy. Doumi was splashing in the water now. Bosh had opened up the store room of the bar and, with instinctive speed, empty bottles were passed from hand to hand. Soon they were being thrown at the Moroccan who, to avoid being hit, was heading further from the bank. He tried to get closer to the steps further downstream but someone threw a hoover at him and now he was in trouble: dazed, terrified, drunk, drowning.

  Four men were later tried and sentenced for manslaughter. The judge, in his sentencing, wrote that ‘there’s no doubt that there was an elevated component of racial hatred’. But the ultras were inevitably defended by the brotherhood. The Granata Korps hung up a banner after the sentence denouncing ‘Communist justice’. Because his son had been found guilty, Yeti’s father – in a bizarre twist of logic – said, ‘I’m ashamed to be Italian.’

  The same year, in a match between Salernitana and Brescia, a fight broke out amongst the fifty or so Brescia ultras who had made the long journey south. A twenty-eight-year-old welder, Roberto Bani, was knocked out and, never emerging from his coma, died six days later.

  19 November 1994: Brescia v. Roma

  It was the middle of the night and something didn’t look right. Amongst the Roma fans in the railway station, heading north to Brescia for the game, there were unfamiliar faces. There were Lazio fans like Corrado Ovidi and many of the scarves were black, not red-and-yellow. Maurizio Boccacci, a man with a thin face and heavy eyelids, was giving the orders. He was the founder of the Movimento Politico Occidentale (MPO) and wasn’t a football fan. The MPO had recently been outlawed, accused of recreating the Fascist Party.

  Many of the Roma fans were from an ultra group called Opposta Fazione (‘The Opposing Faction’). Its slogan was ‘meno calcio, più calci’ (‘less football, more kickings’). Its leader, nicknamed Rommel, had recently been arrested and sentenced for a bank job in which his accomplice, Kapplerino (a diminutive version of the name of the Nazi commander in Rome during the Second World War), and a security guard had been killed.

  Two of the other leaders of Opposta Fazione, nicknamed la Rana (‘the Frog’) and Er Polpetta (‘Meatball’), were also on the train. The former was a local councillor in the MSI, the latter an acolyte of Boccacci in the MPO. A burly man called Daniele De Santis was also there, as was a Roma youth player, Daniele Betti, who was suspended for the weekend’s game and had decided to travel with the fans. The Roman police at the station realized something was amiss and phoned the Brescia Questura (police station) to warn them of trouble.

  The men carried onto the train bags containing flags and banners, but also axes, knives, firecrackers, flares and homemade bombs. The train pulled out at 3.30 that morning, arriving at Brescia at midday on Sunday, 20 November. The men were herded onto buses and escorted to the stadium. As they left the buses, they shouted old fascist slogans like ‘boia chi molla’ – ‘the executioner for quitters’ – and attacked the police.

  For hours it was street warfare. Smoke from the flares mixed with police tear gas. Homemade bombs were thrown. Truncheons and axes clashed. The city’s Deputy Commissioner, Giovanni Selmin, was stabbed in the abdomen and rushed to hospital. Another officer was injured by one of the rudimentary bombs. Cobbles and lampposts were ripped up and thrown at the Carabinieri.

  Inside the stadium it was hardly more tranquil. Flares were thrown onto the pitch and into the home fans’ stands. Fascist salutes were given in all directions, the straight arms forming a forest of flat erections. The game was goalless but no one was watching the game. During the hours of fighting, the apparent commander, the fascist Boccacci, repeatedly changed jackets to make it harder to recognize him.

  There had, of course, been plenty of scuffles and fights in the past. They were an almost weekly occurrence. But this was very different. It was a ferocious and planned attack on the police by neo-fascists from both the Lazio and Roma fan groups. It was a show of strength, a declaration that from now on the terraces were the territory of the extreme right.

  The investigation that followed tried to unravel the reasons behind the insurrection. It was partly, the investigators concluded, motivated by a change of ownership of Roma itself. The previous president, Giuseppe Ciarrapico, was politically sympathetic to the right and had gifted ultras tickets that they could then tout at a profit. The new president, Franco Sensi, broke the tradition and the riot was, perhaps, partly an attempt to threaten him into submission. But investigators also believed that the riot was a defiant response by Boccacci and his associates to the forced dissolution of both his MPO and a comparable organization, the Base Autonoma. It was a form of retribution against what they perceived to be a repressive state. There were other theories, too. That neo-fascists had deliberately chosen to stage a show of nationalist strength in the heartlands of the separatist Northern League. Others believed it was nothing more complicated than nihilistic violence.

  Whatever the causes, the violence in Brescia in 1994 was one of the first warnings that the ultra movement was evolving. All movements shift and slide into something else, something which bears a clear relation to – but also a subtle rejection of – their former selves. With a movement as fractured and chaotic as that of the ultras, it was inevitable that, decades after the first group had been founded, the phenomenon would be altered. ‘Alter’, after all, was an etymological cousin of the word ultra. That subtle, slow mutation was also occurring because in some ways the ultras had, by 1994, slightly lost their raison d’être. The transgressions of the ultras – bingeing on banned substances, dressing up and dressing down, travelling to far-off cities – had become normalized within society by the late twentieth century. You no longer needed the support of the pack to transgress and to travel. What Umberto Eco wrote about the carnival could equally apply to that other carnival location, the curva: ‘Carnival comic, the moment of transgression, can exist only if a background of unquestioned observance exists.’

  The conundrum of how to remain outlaws in an indulgent world was answered loudly and eloquently by ultras from the far right. The ‘gestures, actions and slogans’ of fascism were still nominally illegal under the 1993 Mancino Law. The law was rarely applied but its existence persuaded neo-fascist ultras that they were now the only outsiders, and the guaranteed scorn of mainstream society when those gestures were photographed, filmed and publicized only reinforced that perception. Only amongst fascist ultra groups, they said, could you remain beyond the bourgeois. As the Western world appeared to enter the ‘end of ideologies’, this new generation of ultras would become ever more ideological. In a period of profound political confusion, many terraces began to offer the opposite: certainty and the absolute. If the main
stream was globalizing, with nations mixing and secularizing, these ultras would be the opposite: regional patriots, faithful to their long-lost cause.

  Toying with the symbols of Nazi-fascism had long been used by contrarian rebels as a way to spite society or – as Hunter S. Thompson said of the Hells Angels’ swastika fetish – as a ‘gimmick to bug the squares’. The widespread sucking of teeth in the media every time certain ultra groups sang fascist songs or performed the straight-arm salute meant that they were both vilified and publicized, which is what they wanted. Many of the eloquent sociologists of Italian stadiums, like Giorgio Triani, felt that the fascist symbols were more a pose than a belief, used ‘for their shock effect, for their terrorizing power, for their capacity to evoke cruel and bloody scenes’. Many ultras used an almost identical reasoning: it was a flicking of the finger to the system, nothing else. The ultra world, said the apologists, had always been full of bricoleurs, mixing-and-matching symbols from across the globe. Nothing was off-limits, they said, and never had been. Now there were simply more Roman salutes and images of the man they called ‘Mascellone’ (the ‘big jaw’).

  Even the far-left ultras were sometimes slow to stop the drift. Many spoke of the curva as a conca, a ‘bowl’, so accommodating that it took in all the outcasts, even extremists from the right. If there were the odd grim symbol here and there, once a month, it was a sign not of the terraces’ intolerance but the opposite. Many were slow to see that the movement was, by the mid-1990s, being deliberately hijacked by a very determined far right uninterested in tolerance.

  That early insouciance, however, was soon replaced by alarm. Alessandro Dal Lago was one of the most perceptive observers of the Italian ultras. In 1990 he had published a book called Description of a Battle, in which, counter to the received wisdom, he suggested that the ultras’ violence was largely ritualized, not real. Now, though, he admitted to perceiving something far darker: ‘… the exploitation by extreme right-wing groups… using the ultras as an electoral basin. We’re talking about a leaden atmosphere, incarnated in runes, swastikas, Roman salutes, belligerence, racist banners and so on which have largely marginalized both the original ritualism, but also whatever remained or remains of left-wing symbology.’

  The error had been to equate ritual with the superficial and assume, condescendingly, that ultras were so thick that they didn’t really know what they were doing. In reality, in the quasi-religious world of the ultras, ritual was the opposite of superficial. It was a consequence of deep roots. Anyone who has participated in ultra meetings knows that the iconography of the terraces is never inadvertent or casual, but rather the result of fierce debate and argument. A central part of the Sunday ceremony at the stadium was the revelation of, and reverence towards, a group’s symbols. So began a feedback loop in which the segregation of the ‘deviant’ group led to more radicalization, stigmatization and isolation, which in turn increased the deviancy. Societal scorn affirmed neo-fascists in their convictions and they upped the production of more fascist graffiti, banners and slogans, which only created more scorn and attracted recruits who saw in those symbols and slogans a reflection of their own politics.

  For those on the right, however, it was as if the ultra world had finally found its true self. One of the new generation of Torino ultras, Roberto LoSpinosa, once said (in a documentary called Ultras for Better or Worse): ‘… the phenomenon itself is right-wing, as an idea it’s right-wing.’ One Hellas Verona ultra said that ‘to be an ultra means to be right-wing. An ultra group is certainly right-wing, certainly fascist. It’s the actual group which demands it. We are fascists and the terraces aren’t places for democrats. The terrace is a place where you recognize leaders, where there are sergeants, lieutenants and captains. It’s organized in a military way and the ultras are militarized.’

  Having once offered a teenager-ish rejection of elders, this new generation of extremists positioned themselves as treasurers of the past, or at least their version of it. The names of ultra groups had always offered eloquent hints about how the movement saw itself and now many started calling themselves ‘Tradition’ or (as with the Roma group) ‘Tradizione Distinzione’. There were other key words which spoke of their affiliations – ‘honour’ and ‘loyalty’ – and new songs whose lyrics described ‘straight arms to the sky’. Paramilitary clothing became more common as did dressing identically: often black hoodies or green bomber jackets, partly because homogeneity made identification by the police far harder, but more because it lent a military appearance of foreboding unity. As Italy began to witness, for the first time in living memory, mass immigration (first from Albania and Eastern Europe, and then from all over the globe), a movement that seemed predicated on disdain for the other was appealing to a new generation.

  The extremism of the terraces was given resonance because, after the stable, anti-fascist certainties of the First Republic, Italy was now grappling with historical debates dating back to the Second World War. The Establishment view that partisans were morally superior to those Italians who had remained loyal to Mussolini was being challenged by revisionist historians and right-wing politicians. The arrest of a German war criminal brought the debate suddenly to the fore. In 1994 an American TV station tracked down a former SS captain who had been living in Argentina for almost half a century. Erich Priebke had been stationed in Rome in the Second World War and was considered one of the officers responsible for one of the worst atrocities of the war on Italian soil, the execution of 335 Italians in the Fosse Ardeatine caves on the outskirts of Rome on 24 March 1944.

  The killings were revenge for a partisan attack on German troops in Via Rasella in Rome, in which thirty-three soldiers had lost their lives. Adolf Hitler had ordered that thirty Italians (later reduced to ten) be executed for every single German killed. A Gestapo officer, Priebke was in charge of selecting the 330 Italians and he added an extra five, personally shooting at least two of them. He escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Rimini in 1946 and with the help of various priests had emigrated to Argentina.

  In 1995 Priebke was extradited to Italy and stood trial for war crimes. The legal case continued for three years and Priebke’s cause was enthusiastically taken up by those who saw the trial as a chance to rewrite Italian history. Priebke was depicted, by these revisionists, as a loyal soldier and the Italian partisans as murderous terrorists. Many of the ultras who had been in Brescia in 1994 were at the forefront of the campaign. In January 1996 they put up memorials in Via Rasella in honour of the dead German soldiers (‘… victims of an anti-fascist and partisan slaughter perpetrated by vile assassins…’). In April 1996 they defaced the memorials to the victims of the Fosse Ardeatine murders. Surviving partisans and witnesses were threatened. In many ways the neo-fascists’ position was absurd: their ideology twisted patriotism to the point at which they were defending a German war criminal and belittling the memories of hundreds of Italians. But it wasn’t only mavericks and isolated eccentrics defending Priebke. His defence lawyer, Carlo Taormina, was a prominent politician in Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party.

  Throughout 1995 there were repeated and seemingly random attacks on foreigners in Rome – a Bengali man at Portonaccio, a Russian wearing a kippah in the Primavalle gardens – and ever-increasing antisemitic graffiti in cemeteries. In 1996, after Bologna had gained promotion to Serie A, there were anti-immigrant lynchings across the city, with eight North Africans hospitalized, one having been stabbed in the kidneys. It was very clear that the political wind had radically altered.

  Even though he had been present at the Brescia–Roma match, Maurizio Boccacci wasn’t an ultra, and it would be absurd to suggest that the rise of the far right was merely down to the ultras. But many extremist political movements – first Movimento Politico, Meridiano Zero and Base Autonoma, and later Forza Nuova and CasaPound – found fertile soil amongst the tough nuts of the terraces. In 1999, on 25 April – the day celebrating Italy’s liberation from fascism – a banner held up by Roma ultras a
t the Roma–Parma match read: ‘25 April 1943 – when cowards proclaimed themselves heroes.’

  Left-wing observers had often worried that football, more than religion, was Sunday’s opium of the people, and that the two hours of contained fury depleted the energies and opportunities for real insurrection or liberation. But many felt that the left-wing intellectuals’ scorn for the terraces in some ways created a vacuum that was filled by the far right. ‘… if today many terraces are orientated towards the extreme right,’ wrote Andrea Ferreri, ‘part of the responsibility lies with the indifference and criminalization that the political forces of the left have expressed towards the ultra world.’ Whereas right-wing politicians had seen an electoral base, and a propaganda cauldron, in the terraces, the left had been strangely elitist towards those in the cheap seats.

  29 January 1995, Genova

  Simone Barbaglia was a troubled eighteen-year-old. He didn’t really know where to call home. After his parents had separated, he lived with grandmother near the San Siro in Via Primaticcio. Later he moved back in with his mother, her new partner and their son. He had been excluded from school trips for bad behaviour and was often failed at the end of a school year. He had quit education in his mid-teens and eventually got a job mowing lawns for a maintenance firm.

  Even as a fan, he didn’t know where he belonged. In his youth he had followed Juventus but as Milan had recently supplanted Juventus as the most exciting side in Italy, Simone had switched and become a Milanista. He had drifted towards a splinter group of the famous Brigate Rossonere, Brigate 2, which was much further to the right. He was an informal member of a sub-group of that splinter called Gruppo del Barbour, because of the jackets they wore. The leader of the Brigate 2 splinter group was nicknamed ‘il Chirurgo’ (‘the surgeon’). He was an accountant with a history of football-related knife crime throughout the 1980s.