Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  One of the first people to visit him in the hospital was Padre Fedele, dressed in a doctor’s white coat. Twenty or so ultras were protesting outside the hospital. The atmosphere was so inflammable that the surgeon wheeled Claudio onto a balcony to calm things down. But the confrontation with the police continued. Weeks later, his leg in traction at home, Claudio’s home was raided at 4 a.m. Police removed fifteen years of ultra archives. Within minutes Padre Fedele arrived and, ever protective of his adoptive son, lost his temper with the police. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he screamed.

  It seemed, to many in the city, absurd. With all the criminals in Calabria, and even within the ultra movement, to choose from, the police were picking on a schoolteacher whose only crime was lèse-majesté: criticism of the Establishment in general and of the police in particular. His was an antagonistic voice, certainly, constantly accusing the police of violence. ‘Indiscriminate beatings, arrests without guarantees,’ Claudio later wrote, ‘[the atrocity in] Genova isn’t an exception but the rule.’ He was adamant that it was the militarization of the police that had made the ultras violent and not vice versa. He never denied being a participant in fights. But to most people Claudio seemed the noblest expression of the movement: mentored, as a teenager, by a Franciscan friar, he saw in the terraces the possibility of an alternative world, a place where the dispossessed and the weakest could gather and find protection.

  But by now the police were investigating a political network called Rebel South, in which Claudio and other radicals were involved. Police tried to tie the night-time explosions of the 1990s to the group. It was tenuous to say the least but that was the reason for his imprisonment. Claudio was released, pending trial, a week later. He didn’t reach Cosenza until dawn, just as the rising sun was kissing the Silan mountains to the west. But there, waiting by the motorway exit, were a hundred or so ultras, singing and clapping as his car came into view.

  The ultra world is often defined by hatred. But Claudio, writing about that dawn, showed that an ultra is also inspired by the opposite: ‘I decided to love you [Cosenza] years ago, when I started proudly to wear the colours of the city. For an ultra, the feeling of appreciation towards one’s own land is written in our DNA. I love your history, Cosenza. I love your legends. I love your rivers and I love the old city. I love your sky and the two mountain ranges which hug you. I love the villages which surround you. I love the gypsies and migrants. I love the Ciroma radio and all the liberated spaces. I love this terrace and its colours. I thank mother nature that I was brought into the world here, at the confluence of the Crati and Busento rivers.’

  A laborious trial later cleared him and his alleged accomplices of all charges. But what that arrest, and many others, showed was how much the police and ultra groups were now targeting each other. During 2002–03 there were 51 per cent more stadium-related arrests than the previous season. The figures published by Gnosis, the online magazine of SISDE, an arm of the intelligence services, suggest that whilst there were many fewer actual incidents (a reduction of 40 per cent every year), the violence of those incidents was increasing, with the number of those wounded actually on the rise: from 400 in the 95–96 season to almost 1,200 four years later. Another clear change was the fact that ultra groups, as much as targeting each other, were now fighting pitched battles against public officials. Of the 850 injured in the 2002–03 season, 612 were from the ‘forces of order’, an increase of 72 per cent on the previous year. Even allowing for the cynic’s response that the police had an economic incentive to claim injury, it was clear that the ultras had a new target.

  Threatened by what they saw as a resurgent fascism within the movement and targeted by an authoritarian police force outside it, left-leaning ultras decided it was time to fight back. Ever since 1997 an organization called Progetto Ultrà had run a tournament called the ‘Anti-Racist World Cup’ outside Modena (the slogan echoed that of Genova’s G8: ‘Another football is possible’). In 2002 a movement called the Ultras Resistance Front was born. It was founded by Livorno’s (notoriously far-left) ultras and immediately supported by Ancona’s Ultras and Ternana’s Freak Brothers. Soon other groups that were traditionally from the anarchist or antagonist traditions – Caserta’s ‘Against Racism’, Cosenza’s Rebel Fans, Sambenedettese’s ‘Nucleo’, Modena’s ‘Brigate’ and Venezia’s ‘Rude Fans’ – joined the resistance. That summer, in Narni (the geographical centre of Italy), they organized an international anti-racist rally.

  Whilst many far-right ultras had assumed that the vaunted ‘ultra mentality’ was a perfect fit with fascism, those in the Ultras Resistance Front made a case for the opposite: sport, they said, knew no skin colour, only the colour of the shirt. Fandom was about association, which was, after all, where the word ‘soccer’ came from. The ultras were partisans and freedom-fighters, they said, able to liberate spaces from the control of a corrupted system. They were, they said, creating alternative communities based on the values of ultra fandom. As Marco De Rose (one of the Rebel Fans) wrote in his book, Controcultura Ultras, ‘The ultras are the most true and rebellious part of society, a social force for aggregation and participation… but the real struggle of the ultras is in the streets and the squares.’

  If the left-leaning ultras were taking the fight elsewhere, it was partly because football was increasingly unreliable as a sport. For a decade Cosenza had seemed a pretty crooked club: the cars of critical journalists or investors were shot at or burnt. When one mafia pentito, Franco Pino, alleged that results had been altered in return for cash, nobody was even surprised. The club president spread his bets and bought a second club, Spal, in Ferrara. The team was docked nine points for financial irregularities. It returned to Serie B in 1998 but then, in 2003, there was another ‘Caso Catania’, in which various teams lodged appeals to be promoted because one or other rival team had fielded disqualified players. Cosenza, which had gone bankrupt with debts of over €12 million, was relegated by the lawyers. The following season there were two teams calling themselves Cosenza: Cosenza FC and Cosenza Calcio 1914. Fans were so incensed by this situation that during the derby between the two teams, they occupied the pitch and stopped the game going ahead. Cosenza Calcio 1914 went bust in 2005, and then Cosenza FC, having changed its name to the Associazione Sportiva Cosenza Calcio, collapsed in 2007. A suburb of the city, Rende, then changed the name of its team from Rende FC to Fortitudo Cosenza and became the ‘official’ team. It was sometimes hard to understand who you were supporting any more.

  But often the retreat from the terraces was an admission that the fun was finished and that the stadiums only offered bulletins of deaths. In 20 September 2003, in Avellino, Sergio Ercolano tried to slide down a perspex roof over the stadium’s gym to escape fighting and fell a dozen metres onto a concrete no-man’s land. Fans called the emergency services and screamed at the police. When the ambulance arrived, nobody could find the key to unlock the door to the passageway where Ercolano was lying motionless. For the next half an hour, the ultras took almost complete control of the ground. They ran onto the pitch with sticks and chains, beating the police. The ground was united in singing ‘assassini’ to the men and women in blue helmets. One policeman was stabbed, another had a heart attack. Ercolano died in hospital the following Monday afternoon.

  Even those ultras who believed that incompetent ticketing and police brutality were equally responsible for what had happened felt that the game was up. The battle in the stadiums could only have one victor and the minority of left-leaning ultras decided to pick a fight on other terms. ‘It takes courage,’ said the Associazione Noi Ultras after Sergio Ercolano’s death, ‘to desert a war which is, however, lost.’ But, the Association said, there was ‘a war to fight on another plain, with other arms: solidarity, sporting passion, the desire to be a part of something. To be squashed by a violence-repression-violence logic will serve only to generate more tears, more pain, more anger.’ Ercolano’s father joined the Battito Azzurro (‘Blue Heartbeat’)
fans’ organization, run by the former capo-ultra of Napoli’s glory years, Pallummella, which was campaigning for a return to simpler, safer Sundays.

  *

  There’s a proverb in Italy which says that ‘to know the truth you need to listen to two liars’. It expresses the notion that everything is fazioso (sectarian) and that if you confront two fables, you’ll begin to see what is false and be able to feel the contours of the truth. But it also hints at a willingness to lend an indulgent ear to all and sundry and do away with any acoustic quality control. It’s almost as if there’s a conversational quicksand into which everything will sink. Relentless rhetoric insists and persuades and disorientates, until there’s nothing solid onto which you can grab hold.

  That’s certainly the case when you try to define fascism. Mussolini himself liked to boast that his ideology was ‘the church of all the heresies’, implying that there were no orthodoxies to it at all. ‘We don’t believe in dogmatic programmes,’ he said on another occasion, ‘we allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocratic and democratic, conservatives and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legals and illegals…’ It was totalitarianism mounted on slipperiness. ‘Mussolini did not have a philosophy,’ Umberto Eco once wrote. ‘He had only rhetoric. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.’

  In some ways, that unifying personality cult is continued by some of the biggest ultra groups. Juventus’s Drughi have a portrait of Mussolini in their headquarters; Roma’s Boys have his bust. You lose count of the number of times you see him – or Julius Evola or Gabriele D’Annunzio – in their HQs. There is lots of playing with symbols. Any Roma Boy who was given a stadium ban used to be given a miniature double-headed axe. In terms of recruitment, there was a ‘pull’ from the HQ of those firms, which made you feel pretty invincible once you were inside; but there was also a ‘push’ from political parties, sending their young men into the terraces.

  Roberto Fiore, one of the founders of the extreme-right Terza Posizione who had made his fortune in London, returned to Italy in 1999 having founded another fascist movement called Forza Nuova. Fiore was a clerico-fascist, close to the extreme dissident Catholics of the Society of Saint Pius X, and he saw the terraces as a major site of missionary outreach. Soon the banners seen in the stadium were reflecting his influence. On 27 October 2002 one exhorted fans to attend the celebration for the eightieth anniversary of Mussolini’s march on Rome. ‘March, don’t go rotten,’ it said. In 2006 another banner used the old slogan of the Teutonic knights and Nazi Germany: Gott Mit Uns (‘God is with us’). It has now become a common inscription on ultra scarves. Inter ultras began singing, ‘We’re the ones who took Anne Frank.’ Another frequent banner on the terraces was ‘Santa Teppa’, the phrase Mussolini once used to describe his black shirts: ‘holy thugs’.

  This infiltration of the terraces was partly because the far right had borrowed a strategy from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. He urged ‘cultural hegemony’, meaning the creation of political consensus through cultural conversion. The far right gave this strategy a new name – ‘metapolitics’ – and another neo-fascist party, called CasaPound in honour of the late fascist evangelist, the American poet Ezra Pound – was particularly adept at this cultural infusion. Here, too, there was plenty of ideological contortionism. CasaPound started describing itself not as fascist, but as estremo centro alto (‘extreme, high centre’, the name of a song by its founder Gianluca Iannone’s rock band, ZetaZeroAlpha). It opened gyms, pubs, parachute clubs, sub-acqua clubs, motorbike clubs, football teams, restaurants, night-clubs, tattoo parlours and barbers. Then CasaPound militants set up a Roma ultra group called Padroni di Casa (‘Landlords of the House’).

  Fascism, it was clear, was suddenly fashionable. Its symbols (the lictor’s bundle, the Celtic cross, the double-headed axe), its look (shaved heads and sartorial sameness) and buzzwords (‘honour’, ‘loyalty’, ‘youth’, ‘action’) became ubiquitous on the terraces. Groups announced their politics by the use of the font of Ultras Liberi, often written in white lettering on a black background and overlaid with tricolour ribbons. Style had always been integral to fascism’s appeal: himself a silver-tongued poseur, Mussolini once bragged that ‘fascism has brought style back into the life of the people: a way of behaving, meaning colour, force, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical…’ For a subculture so conscious of style as that of the ultras, the vogueishness of the far right was particularly appealing.

  In those first years of the twenty-first century it felt as if the political wind was only blowing in one direction: Gianni Alemanno – a man then married to the daughter of the political terrorist, Pino Rauti – was a minister in Berlusconi’s government (he would later become Mayor of Rome). The birthplace of Mussolini, Villa Carpera, was bought and turned into a museum of fascist paraphernalia in 2001. Heresies were becoming the orthodoxies once again.

  2003, Genoa

  In 2003 one of the hardest nuts of the Genoa ultras died. Claudio Natale was known by everyone as Speloncia. He was renowned as a proper street fighter, as befitted a man who had Benito Mussolini’s face tattooed on his forearm. In his memory a new firm was created: the Brigata Speloncia. Many people assumed it was fascist, and it’s true that its adherents were ‘nostalgics’, but they claimed they checked in their politics at the turnstiles, refusing – in old ultra tradition – to allow politics to enter the terraces. Puffer, who became the leader, claimed that they wore black shirts as a sign not of political ideology but of mourning for Speloncia.

  That same year a businessman called Enrico Preziosi bought Genoa. He had moved north from Avellino, ending up in Milan where he produced games and toys, including one called ‘Hit the Referee’. His role-model and mentor was Silvio Berlusconi: at one point Preziosi was spending almost 40 per cent of his company’s income on buying advertising space on Berlusconi’s TV channels. By 1994 Preziosi had a turnover of 100 billion lire and 200 employees. He bought a small club, Saronno, taking it from the Interregionale championship to C1. Then, in 1997, he bought Como, promising to take it into Serie A in five years. In 2002 he had done it through a combination of ruthlessness and instinct for promising players. Then, in 2003, he sold Como and bought the oldest club in Italian football, Genoa.

  21 March 2004, Rome: ‘The Derby of the Dead Baby’

  It was the derby: Lazio–Roma. Both teams had, in recent history, won the scudetto and there was a real bite to the encounter. Francesco Totti was at the height of his powers and scoring incredible goals: that strike against Juventus from thirty-five yards out, hit so true it had no bend at all… the third goal against Sampdoria when he dribbled from inside his own half, only it wasn’t a zig-zag dribble but a sprint in which Totti just saw who was coming and angled his run so that he was untouchable. And then he had the coolness, having beaten the whole defence, to dummy a shot, watch the keeper drop, and dink it in.

  He often lobbed the ball, as if time slowed and only he, in the whole stadium, had the composure and vision to chip rather than drill. It was like that fifth goal against Lazio in the derby a couple of years before. It was so impudent that the commentator laughed. Against Inter, when Roma won 3–2 away from home, he jumped through one lunge, found himself surrounded by three Inter players, freed himself, ran and then looked up and, instead of going for power, lobbed it over the keeper. Even the Inter fans were on their feet applauding him.

  That week, as usual, the radios of the city’s taxis were all tuned to the gurgling chat of the capital’s football phone-ins. But that Sunday evening outside the Olimpico something was different. As fans got closer to the stadium, arriving from the footpath along the Tiber, they heard screams and sirens, saw flashing lights and the fizz of tear gas. The serenity of the spring dusk gave way to scenes from a battle.

  It seemed to many ordinary fans as if the police were drunk on power that night. At one point a tear-gas cannister was ev
en fired into the main stand. ‘The cannister,’ said one fan, ‘fell fifty centimetres to my left. I had the feeling that my time had come and that I wouldn’t be going home.’ The most common metaphor used by fans – both ultras and ordinary aficionados – was that it was like a war-zone: the noise, the smoke, the shouts, the fear. Even the Lazio captain, the Serbian Sinisa Mihajlovic, used the same metaphor: ‘I was reliving the scenes that had bloodied my own country.’

  But it was one-sided warfare. The celerini, the ‘riot police’, were disguised, shielded and tooled up with tasers and truncheons. The ultras were mostly unarmed, their weapons were just their feet, fists, belts and voices. Their only other advantage was their ancient weapon of force of numbers. There were soon 80,000 fans in the stadium, outnumbering the riot police by over a hundred to one. That crowd was, by kick-off, seething and hysterical. No one understood the cause of the police brutality. Many were shouting or crying. People heard things and misheard them. Others phoned home to see what the news was saying.

  Crowds have often been compared to beasts or to fires. There’s something beyond control, beyond agency and intention, to a mass of humans. They’re untamed and noisy, which means whispers are misheard. One fan had gone to the ambulance crew to get medical attention. He thought he heard the nurses talking about a death. Another saw a fan laid out on a stretcher, with his face covered by a sheet because all the tear gas had caused an asthma attack. The fan assumed it was a dead body. Marco, one fan, said that ‘the news travelled fast… a boy next to me said “I’ve phoned home and there are two kids dead.” I saw absurd scenes: people crying and shouting and we didn’t know what to do.’