Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Milan used to give out hundreds of free and discounted tickets to ultra groups, and the Surgeon would sell his batch to aspiring ultras every Thursday in a bar called Il Sorriso (‘The Smile’) in Bovisa, to the north of the city. Simone went along and bought his ticket for Sunday’s game against Genoa for 30,000 lire (about eight pounds).

  The next day Simone asked to borrow a butterfly-knife from a mate. ‘I want to cut up a Genoano,’ he said. Milan and Genoa had once been twinned, partly because both sets of fans were traditionally left-wing, but that twinning had ended and there were often fights between the two sets of fans, most recently in September 1993. Simone took his friend’s knife home with him that night and practised flicking it open.

  On the Sunday morning, the Surgeon and his crew didn’t get the ‘special’ train laid on for Milan fans. They wanted to go under the radar and got the 11.50 instead. There was the usual boasting and boozing on the way, and by the time the splinter group got out at Genova Brignole, they were excited and singing loudly. It was a five-minute walk along the Bisagno river to the famous stadium.

  Claudio Spagnolo, known as ‘Spagna’, was hanging outside the famous gradinata nord. Here, on Via Spensley, everyone was wearing the red-and-blue of Genoa. Spagna was twenty-four and during the summer had worked with his aunt in an estate agents in Porto Rotondo, in Sardinia. He liked reggae and hung out in the Zapata social centre in the city.

  At 1.40 p.m. the splinter group – under the command of the ‘Surgeon’ – moved in. It wasn’t a well-organized charge. Simone rushed forwards with his hands in his pockets. He pulled out the knife and opened it up. Simone later described what he was thinking: ‘The idea of being seen running away by Carlo [the ‘Surgeon’], and showing him that I lacked courage, was unbearable. If I pulled out a knife I would have given to Carlo a demonstration of my courage. I cared what he thought about me…’

  Simone jabbed his blade at Spagna, who was off-balance having tried to disarm him with a kick. Spagna fell to the ground, bleeding profusely. Within minutes he was dead.

  The disgust at that killing was unprecedented. As soon as word got around, the Genoa ultras removed all their banners. Fabio Fazio, hosting a live programme about football, abandoned the studio. The match between Genoa and Milan was postponed.

  The Milan fans were kept inside the stadium. Simone and friends swapped jackets and scarves. One of them chucked his knife in the toilet. Having identified and photographed everyone, the police decided to let them get their coaches home to avoid reprisals within Genova. They arrested Simone at dawn the following day.

  In place of the postponed matches a week later, a summit took place that Sunday, 5 February 1995, between various ultra groups in Genova. The slogan was ‘Basta Lame, Basta Infami’ (‘Enough of knives, enough of villains’). But the statement released to coincide with that conference, and published in the Gazzetta dello Sport, offered as much defiance as it did contrition. The ultras condemned ‘these villains’ and ‘this vile behaviour’. ‘We shout enough,’ they said, renouncing ‘the fashion for twenty against two or three with Molotovs and knives.’ But at the same time they wrote that ‘if living as an ultra is truly a way to live, let’s get our balls out’. They warned that ‘the police will be waiting only to see us finished. Let’s unite against those who want to kill the entirety of the ultra world, a world free and true despite all its contradictions.’

  Barbaglia was sentenced to fourteen and a half years for the killing. Outside the stadium there’s now a column of eleven massive blocks of white stone remembering the Genoa fan. Nearby, a plaque uses the same words as a Genoa banner after the killing: ‘To live in the hearts of who remains is not to die. Bye Spagna.’

  1996, Catania

  Michele Spampinato was as skinny and tense as a piano wire. He had sharp elbows and fast feet, though his face was wider: big ears, a wide nose and a blink-and-you-miss-it smile.

  He had grown up in the Catania suburb of San Cristoforo. It was a suburb close to the centre but completely different: instead of the Roman ruins and Vincenzo Bellini’s grand baroque architecture, here there were narrow alleys, crumbling balconies and aluminium shacks. Wires and pipes were strung haphazardly from one block to the next. It smelt of fish, fruit and tobacco. But there was a grass-roots panache to the place. ‘La Moda alle Puttane,’ said one spray-painted wall, ‘Lo Stile agli Ultras’ (‘[Leave] fashion to the whores, and the style to the ultras’).

  The umbrella ultra organization in Catania was called the Falange d’Assalto Rossoazzurra, the ‘Red-and-Blue Assault Phalanx’. It had been founded in 1979 by a short fascist called Ciccio. Everyone called him Ciccio Fascista or else Ciccio Falange. The group had a red-and-blue drawbridge for a door just next to Castello Ursino. Ciccio Fascista liked the fact that Catania’s terrace had always been politically black. Catania football club had originally been called the ‘Associazione Fascista Calcio Catania’.

  But Spampinato was beginning to peel away from that historic group. He wanted to do things differently. He had gathered a small crew of people from the tough suburbs who followed him because he was so decisive and he made them love where they lived. ‘How can you not love a city,’ he says in his double-quick manner, ‘which allows you to ski around a volcano, where one side there’s an eruption, and the other side the sea?’ All the kids from other tough suburbs liked hanging around him.

  Spampinato wasn’t fixated on the name of his emerging group. That refusal to get attached to a name was part of his attempt to avoid a Mafia-ization of the terraces. ‘There’s a great wound here,’ he says, ‘which is the Mafia. There’s no point pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s rooted in the suburbs and every suburb is the representation of its family. You’ve grown up with that. You live your suburb as if it’s a group, with that name, and in another there’s another name, and you bring that mentality into the terraces.’

  Spampinato wanted to avoid labels that divided the red-and-blue faithful. If you concentrated only on the purity of the Catania cause, he felt, there would be no divisions. ‘Ever since the 1990s,’ he remembers, ‘we’ve tried to do away with banners.’ It was almost as if this tense man, then in his early twenties, was a puritan, smashing the images and icons that got in the way of the true object of adoration.

  Soon, he and his men were meeting up not in Castel Ursino, but in Piazza Dante, in the open air under the oak tree by the wall of the monastery. There you could get a bottle of beer for less than a pound and if you didn’t have the dosh, someone else would pay or you could put it on a tab. Spampinato bossed those weekly meetings. He had a stringy energy about him that could whip people who were offside. He would roam around while talking, stare at the troops with disdain, or pick a fight with someone and make an example of them. He would seem to sulk, going silent and brooding. But then suddenly he would tell someone to shut up, and tell them why. If the guy kept interrupting, Spampinato would take him outside the circle and teach him how to behave. That was the only time you could take your eyes off him.

  Once Spampinato decided the line, discussion was over. He would make up his mind in a split second, interrupting one cause and ruling for another. (The group was eventually dubbed ‘The Decisives’.) His voice was what settled it. When he said ‘this is an order’, there was silence.

  Spampinato had grown up on the legend of a team punished and pimped by sporting authorities on the mainland. But there were moments of glory too, like the time Catania unexpectedly beat Inter 2–0 in 1961, denying them the scudetto. The commentator screamed ‘clamoroso al Cibali’ (‘sensational news’ from Catania’s ground), a phrase now used any time there’s an astonishing shock.

  Back then, the stadium’s custodian was a gruff man called Angelo Grasso. He was there for thirty years, and every year the insults he put up with got worse. People broke his windows and urinated on his little house from the stand above. In 1983 he lost it, loading up a shotgun and firing as fast as he could into the Curva Sud. He injured thirty-two fa
ns and killed one.

  Catanesi have always felt a bit like underdogs. They think their city should be the capital of Sicily (as it used to be under the Aragons). But there’s only ever been bad luck. Catania has been destroyed nine times, either by earthquake or by the lava of the mighty Mount Etna, whose snowy peak comes into view on every corner. After each disaster, the Catanesi reconstructed their city, trying to rebuild it in the same place, with the same squares. In the little fort at the end of the long hill away from the main square, there’s a phoenix with the inscription ‘Melior de Cinere Surgo’ – ‘I will arise better from the ashes’.

  Perhaps that’s why Catania has an obsessional support for the team. It’s a way to identify with this beautiful, scarred city. The older fans will tell you that the club was co-founded by a baron, Gaetano Ventimiglia, who went on to work with Alfred Hitchcock… or that, like the Great Torino of the 1940s, Catania too had had a Hungarian coach, Géza Kertész. He had died in the Second World War and was remembered as the ‘Schindler of Catania’, having tried to rescue various Jewish families. It’s a support which always bleeds into superstition: a hole has been smashed into the Perspex of the players’ tunnel so that salt can be thrown on the players to bring good luck.

  Spampinato became furious when he saw people supporting other teams. There was only one way to change that. ‘A sort of repression’ – he doesn’t miss a beat – ‘an imposition that helps people never forget that here you don’t support Milan or Juventus. Here there’s only Catania. You do that by numbers, gathering people, saying “here there won’t be a party [for a Milan or Juventus scudetto] because otherwise we’ll give it to you”.’ ‘Those who aren’t with us,’ Spampinato liked saying, ‘are automatically our enemies.’ If you wanted to become the top dog of the terrace – the person to lead the singing and stand at the centre – you had to fight the other local groups too. And you had to prove you were somehow more ultra than they were: harder, more extreme, more radical. Spampinato loved the adrenalin of hand-to-hand fights and the effect it could have on the loser: ‘We expected respect, and if we didn’t get it, we imposed it.’

  That attachment to the shirt meant that the Catanesi ultras were amongst the first to refuse to chant the names of individual players. After the ‘Bosman ruling’ of 1995, footballers were allowed to leave clubs when their contracts expired, meaning that many became far more itinerant than before or, according to fans, increasingly disloyal. Spampinato decided that no individual should be applauded or eulogized. ‘Sporting behaviour doesn’t inhabit our latitudes,’ he says. ‘Zola once scored a goal here and people were clapping, and we got up en masse and were practically about to chuck them off the balcony.’

  Spampinato was always fretting about betrayal. He said he loved the city like the murdered anti-Mafia journalist Giuseppe Fava loved it: ‘… like a whore who uses all her charms to drive you mad, but who has betrayed you thousands of times.’ Being an ultra was nothing to do with sport. ‘I really don’t love football,’ he told me once. ‘If you ask me about Serie A, I just don’t know. Juventus will be top, because it’s always top, but I limit myself to the division where Catania plays.’ And the team was for him a representation of what he really loved: this city where, he said, ‘You’re always in contact with people. You’re at home in any home.’

  He was worried that outside players would betray the city. The greatest honour for those on the terraces came once, in Messina, when Catania’s away-strip was the same white as the home team, so the Catania players had to borrow red-and-blue shirts from the fans. ‘The players,’ wrote Spampinato in his decent memoir, Quando Saremo Tutti Nella Nord, must ‘be aware of the breath on their neck… They must memorize our faces and think that they will find us in front of them every time their effort is insufficient.’

  Sometimes the targets were worryingly precise. One banner was held up saying that a particular city councillor was ‘in the cross-hairs’. But often the banners were surprisingly erudite, like the long Latin warning they held up (repeating words spoken to Frederick II): ‘Noli Offendere Patriam Agathae Quia Ultrix Iniurarium Est’ (‘Don’t offend the land of Agatha [their patron saint] because she is the avenger of every injustice’).

  For all their attachment to the sacred maglia, the shirt, Spampinato’s crew were casuals. They didn’t wear football tops, but everyday clothes. Many ultra groups, from the mid-1990s onwards, were camouflaging themselves amongst the masses in this way. It was partly fashion but also a strategic decision. Wearing mufti made it harder for police, and opposition ultras, to identify them.

  Spampinato’s crew began to get a reputation as one of the toughest in Italy. It was partly because to get to any game outside Sicily, the Catanesi had to get a ferry in Messina and that sort of bottle-neck was always good for a ruck. Amongst all the minibuses and cars queueing in one crowded loading area, the Catanesi always knew exactly which teams were going where. They weren’t happy with chance meetings. The Decisi deliberately turned up five or six hours before an away game, waiting outside the stadium for the rival firm to show up. ‘It was a swagger,’ he remembers. ‘You step into a city not yours and say “We’re here, we’re Catania in your house” – he’s jabbing two fingers onto the beer mat – “we’re strolling around so if you want to confront us, here we are…”’

  They had look-outs in stations and airports, ready to warn Spampinato of a rival’s approach. They printed fake tickets to allow people into games, thus forcing the police to accommodate them in sections reserved for the opposition, who were then attacked. They wore balaclavas: ‘We became an army without a face,’ remembers Spampinato. In a match against Messina, the throwing of stones, paper bombs and flares was so incessant that a Messina fan, Antonino Currò, died.

  One summer Spampinato and his mates attacked the Juventus ultras who, awaiting a pre-season friendly, were eating and drinking under the Catania terraces. Spampinato smashed a beer bottle over the head of one of them and the rest attacked hard, capturing the Fighters’ banner. In ultra lore, if your herald is taken, the group should dissolve but what happened next – according to Spampinato – was that the Fighters paid €20,000 to a mafioso in order to have their herald returned. Spampinato gave it back at a tense meeting but only once his group had cut it up and defecated all over it.

  The Decisi wasn’t the only group in those years. Catania had the Sostenitori, the ANR (the ‘Non-Recognized Association’), Irriducibili, Falange, Ultras Ghetto, Gioventù, Indians, Drunks, Club Angelo Massimino, Pazzi, Zafferana Rossazzurra, and so on… But Spampinato was now at the head, leading the charge. His troops united under a banner saying ‘A Sostegno di una Fede’ (‘Supporting a faith’). Once a decision was taken by the Decisi directorate, the line was imposed. Yet, at the same time, there was such energy and spontaneity that it was almost impossible to give direction to the crowd. ‘The group doesn’t exist any more,’ Spampinato wrote of those years. ‘The mob dominates, and it’s the mob which dominates itself.’

  Present Day, Carpi v. Cosenza

  We’re supposed to leave at midnight, so people start rolling up at the squatted HQ an hour or two before. There are a few new women here tonight, one successfully winning at pool as the men are paying more attention to her body than the blue baize. She keeps changing the rules but they don’t seem to mind as long as she hangs around.

  The megaphone is out and we’re warming up our voices. Mouse is drinking rum so fast he’s already sunk half a bottle. He’s up and singing, smashing a chair on the ground so that it rattles the rhythm: ‘How beautiful it is, when I get out of the house…’

  As usual, there are lots of quiet, sober people on the fringes, smiling on. Those with stadium bans pass by to wish everyone good luck on the long journey north. A good-natured shouting match takes place over money, as we realize we haven’t got half the dosh we need to get to Emilia and back. The plan is to drive through the night, cut across to the east coast via Basilicata and maybe have breakfast in Ancona. Then head
further north, towards Bologna and beyond.

  ‘Be at the ground by ten,’ says Half-a-Kilo.

  A couple of people slap the back of his neck, laughing. ‘We won’t get there until half-time. Not with Rosario driving.’

  There’s an argument about who should go in which minibus, and you can see people manoeuvring to get in the one with the pool hustler. Those arguments overlap with the money arguments until there’s absolute confusion. Chill is driving Skinny Monica in his BMW – that’s all he cares about – so he refs the discussion.

  We leave at half-midnight but can’t find Left-Behind. He’s not answering his phone, so we drive around the city looking for him. On every other block, Rosario sees a mate and shouts out the window: ‘Where’s Left-Behind?’

  We park up and wait in one place. An hour goes by. Then we move on and wait somewhere else. Finally, he shows up. Rosario shouts at him but Left-Behind says something quietly and we go and look for Egg. We eventually hit the motorway after two in the morning.

  Rosario drives fast but doesn’t wear a seatbelt, so for the next twelve hours there’s a beeping in the van. Rosario gets to choose the music, too, and the only station he can pick up in the mountains plays cheese-tastic pop interspersed with late-night loners trying to chat-up other loners live on radio. The tunnels are just long enough for you to fall asleep when the radio loses reception, but as you emerge from that tunnel the cheese is back in your right lobe. He’s slappy with the pedals too, so that you’re thrown around the bus like rizlas in the wind and pretty soon we all give up any idea of sleep. Boozy Suzy passes round what’s left of the second bottle of rum. Left-Behind scrunches up his buds in a spiked grinder and chain-smokes.