Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Chinaglia himself seems rather dim, never quite understanding all the machinations going on around him. He had already been used as an unwitting figurehead when money-launderers tried to take over Foggia football club the year before, but despite that takeover bid landing him in trouble, he couldn’t resist the temptation to be in charge of his beloved Lazio for a second stint. This strong, stubborn man seemed to reflect perfectly the self-perception that many Laziali had of themselves, and he understood the Irriducibili’s needs. ‘If things work out,’ Chinaglia told the ultra group, ‘I would like to put a few things together, understand? We’ll see.’ He was offering to throw them the scraps again.

  The problem was that the money for the takeover was coming from Neapolitan sources which were very suspect. In the subsequent arrest warrant, the investigating magistrates wrote that the man putting up the cash was ‘tied up with a Camorra [the Neapolitan Mafia] association called the Casalesi clan. He had available a very considerable sum of money – equivalent to $21 million – locked-up in investments in Hungary. It’s a sum absolutely disproportionate to his legitimate activity.’ Put simply, the Lazio takeover bid appeared to be funded by organized crime and Chinaglia was, as the arrest warrant said, ‘a screen’.

  Chinaglia’s reaction to the news that organized crime was recycling money to buy his beloved club, exploiting him as the figurehead, was either naïve or wilfully myopic. Asked if he had complete trust in his backers, he replied that he trusted them ‘because they had loads of money’.

  2006: Eboli v. Cosenza

  Since the advent of smartphones most groups have avidly filmed their fights. The footage isn’t, for obvious legal reasons, uploaded to public sites, but most are only too happy to pull out their phone and show you some of the best. It’s their equivalent of the slow-motion replay.

  ‘This is the throwing of the stones,’ Left-Behind once said to me, as we crowded round his phone. It sounded like a regular liturgical event: il lancio delle pietre. ‘And this is the charge.’ When you’ve watched hundreds of those films, a pattern emerges. The events are usually captured from inside cars or coaches, with a sardonic running commentary: ‘Here come the cops’ or ‘I wouldn’t go down that street, matey-boy.’ You can only see a few heads, and sticks, bobbing in the distance. There’s invariably the sound of sirens. Anyone who wants to join in can get out, anyone who wants to watch can get inside and, like everyone else, film the fun from fifty metres away.

  It’s usually a game. Years ago the Barletta ultras lined up barrels of firecrackers by an embankment, lighting them all just before the convoy of half a dozen Cosenza coaches came by. Marco had his head out of the sunroof of the coach, trying to see what all the explosions were, and saw the rival ultras at a distance, insulting and laughing. So, the convoy stopped and a few men got out, grabbed the metal traffic hurdles and used them as blunt batons to charge the Barletta fans. It was exciting but no one really got hurt. You can often see in these filmed fights the plain-clothes policemen just a few metres from the action, one hand in a trouser pocket, wearing a white shirt and speaking calmly into a walkie-talkie. It’s striking how contained the action is.

  When you compare reports – from police and journalists – with what you actually see, you realize that everyone is exaggerating. The police over-egg the depravity because it’s their job to spot danger (and, maybe, because that way they receive larger budgets, man-power and overtime). Journalists, of course, relish the news of blood and do nothing to diminish the stories. And ultras themselves want to appear as hard as lump-hammers, with each retelling adding new details.

  Sometimes, though, the game goes wrong. Everyone in Cosenza remembers Eboli in 2006. It was supposed to be a friendly occasion but it’s very often friendly games that have the most vicious fights. Two or three Cosentini went into a bar in the town. Versions of what they did vary. They either didn’t pay for their drinks or were making lewd comments to the bar-woman, who was the wife of the local crime boss. The husband got in his car and, as the lads were going to the stadium, mowed them down.

  The fights then got serious. Although the Cosentini ultras are fun-loving jesters, when they decide to fight, they really go for it. There’s a speed to them which is unpredictable and a strategic nous which comes from experience. Incensed that an ultra brother had been knocked down by a car and that the game was still going ahead, one Cosentino ran onto the pitch and punched the Eboli goalkeeper. The fights went on all afternoon.

  Many people took a hiding – slaps and punches and kicks, but nothing too dangerous. But pride was hurt, and as the crowing Cosentini walked back to their coaches, they saw that the unarmed play-fight had turned into something else. People with axes and machetes chased them, and one lad with learning difficulties got left behind. Drainpipe and Barbara went back for him but were taken hostage. From the coaches you could see a hundred men surrounding them. You can hear, during the usual filming from inside the coach, people suddenly screaming in terror.

  The proper criminals had turned up, and one of them spat at Drainpipe: ‘You fuckers have broken our balls. Now you pay for everyone.’ They were stripped of their wallets and given a beating. ‘I thought that I was going to lose my skin there,’ remembers Drainpipe.

  Eboli was one of those rare occasions in which the ludic fight became very real. When you’re an imitative teenager chanting ‘You have to die’ every week, it’s hard to know that it’s only a taunt. But Eboli was also an occasion in which ultra violence was taken on by (at least as the Cosentini tell it) the Mob proper. This wasn’t ultras against ultras, but ultras against professional criminals.

  When the violence was truly grim, though, there were always consequences for the leading group. After Eboli, the Cosenza Supporters decided to dissolve, leaving other groups in the field: Cosenza Vecchia, Alkool Group, Rebel Fans, Mad Boys, Amantea and the Allupati. As one group folded, the personnel bled into others. Everyone knew each other anyway. The boundaries between each group were porous. The same happened on all the terraces: there were feuds and friendships and reconciliations through the decades. But there was always strength in numbers, and so inevitably the entry requirements were low. The more youngsters you could pull in, and the more mental they were, the stronger your group. The terraces filled with hot-tempered types who knew no boundaries, especially that very thin one between facsimile and real violence.

  Present Day: Venezia v. Cosenza

  As soon as you’re beyond San Marco and the Bridge of Sighs, the tourists thin out. It’s two days before Christmas and small groups of Cosentini with red-and-blue scarves are walking along the waterfront boulevard that leads to the second-oldest stadium in Italy: the Stadio Penzo. If Venice is a fish, it’s on the very southern tip of the tail fin, past the Arsenale and the Biennale Gardens.

  The stadium is squeezed between a marina with its slim, white yachts and the leafless lime trees. The north stand for away fans is made of scaffolding poles that seem, from a distance, little more than matchsticks. There’s a friendly atmosphere, partly because it’s Christmas, but also because Venezia and Cosenza used to be twinned. ‘How’s Padre Fedele?’ asks one of the Venice fans. Wherever you go, everyone asks after the Monk.

  As you go to the stadium, there’s a toilet block with a message spray-painted in huge letters, in English: ‘Fight Fascists, Eat Nazis.’ It’s bitterly cold up in the scaffolding-stand, with its green, orange and black seats. All the groups are there: the Irrequieti (‘the restless’), Amantea (the seaside town), the Allupati (a play on words between ‘horny’ and ‘wolf’), Anni Ottanta (the 80s gang) and all the others. There are a few families too, the exiled Cosentini living in the North, who want their frozen children to experience a little bit of their home town. The ultras do a bit of outreach, offering the kids scarves and sandwiches.

  Elastic is leading the singing as usual. One of the numbers is a bit of a mouthful – ‘Orange-green-black-red-and-blue’ – since an old twinning with Venezia has been recreated and i
s now being cemented in song by uniting the colours of the two teams. It feels a bit like ‘I can sing a rainbow’, which is, perhaps, part of the point: the closeness between the two groups of fans is the inclusivity encapsulated in the rainbow flag. It was here, in Venezia, that the ‘Associazione Noi Ultras’ was born, aiming ‘to defend and enhance the sociable, unifying and cultural aspects of ultra fandom against xenophobic and racist degenerations’.

  The ultras here have raised thousands of euros for charities like Emergency, for earthquake relief in Aquila, for the Green Cross and for the relatives of sick children. Throughout the 1990s one of Venezia’s most charismatic ultras was El Bae (‘Balls’). He was a left-wing activist, drawn towards the city’s social centre, called Rivolta, and working as a cook in its ‘hostelry of the dead cop’. He dreamt of going to help the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, but died in 2001, aged only forty, before he could make the trip. Shortly after his death, his friends from forty different fan groups raised money to rebuild a village in the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas, in his name. Calling the project ‘the stadium of Bae’, they built an aqueduct, a football and basketball pitch and a doctor’s surgery.

  ‘The mistrusted are always present,’ we chant, clapping our hands fast. ‘The mistrusted are always present.’ Every time you despair of this numbskull world, you glimpse the beautiful flowers that emerge from the memory of dead ultras. Maurizio Alberti was an ultra from Pisa who died of a heart attack on the terraces when medics, assuming he was simply drunk or high, failed to take his condition sufficiently seriously despite being informed that he had a pacemaker. Since his death in 1999, the Curva Nord of Pisa has created a movement called Mau Ovunque (‘Mau everywhere’), opening a play park in his name for disabled children.

  It’s a good game. Cosenza attack constantly but hit the cross-bar and the post in quick succession. At half-time, we go to the top of the stand to look for Chill, who has made this 2,000-kilometre round trip despite being banned from the stadium. We can’t see him. ‘He’ll be in a bar somewhere,’ reckons SkinnyMon.

  ‘Long way to come for a drink,’ says Left-Behind.

  In the second half, Venezia are pressing for a goal but the game seems to be drifting towards a nil–nil. Between songs Vindov tells me about a feud that happened here back in 2012. There was a serious brawl between Venezia’s own ultras, between the far-left Gate 22 and the far-right Vecchi Ultrà. One of the Gate 22 boys was scared for life after being beaten by a man with a knuckle-duster, so a few months later the boy’s brother sought out the man from the Vecchi Ultrà and attacked him with a hammer, putting him in a coma. ‘Since then they’ve tried to keep politics out of the terraces,’ he says.

  ‘Bet they have,’ says Left-Behind.

  Whilst we’re talking, the ball breaks to Domenico Mungo, who launches it to the right, towards Jaime Báez. It’s a sudden counter-attack and Venezia are exposed. Báez takes a touch and then plays a perfect diagonal ball to the far side, where Tommaso D’Orazio doesn’t break stride, hitting the ball with his left and burying it in the far corner. Suddenly there’s that blissful erasure of anything that separates us from each other. You hug, kiss, high-five. You bound down towards the turf, almost falling over the seats as the mass of humanity pushes you from behind. It’s as if we’ve become a living organism, unable, briefly, to move with any autonomy. (Later I find that section from Elias Canetti’s great book, Crowds and Power, in which he expresses this sense of almost ecstatic union. ‘Only together,’ he wrote, ‘can men free themselves from their burdens of distance; and this, precisely, is what happens in a crowd. During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal. In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to himself; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd.’)

  That density and equality linger for an hour or more after the game. And because it’s Venice, and Christmas, and a victory, a hundred of us are singing loudly through the narrow streets, the raucous unison bouncing off the water and the walls. ‘How beautiful it is,’ we sing yet again, ‘to get out of the house, to go to the stadium, to support Cosenza.’ We pass our Venetian friends and briefly sing the rainbow song, before going back to the old favourites. We pile onto a boat-bus without tickets, overwhelming the inspector with a mixture of menace and humour. As it speeds along the Grand Canal, everyone is singing, banging hard on anything to hand. Red-and-blue flags – with Cosenza written on the horizontal – are hanging out of the windows, and the more tourists gawp at us, the more noise we want to make. Not just to show them that Cosenza has conquered this ancient city but to keep ourselves dense and united. Because any minute we’ll all go our separate ways and the world will seem colder and lonelier again.

  2007, Cosenza

  In January 2007, just short of his forty-sixth birthday, Piero Romeo suffered a cerebral aneurysm. He was paralyzed down his left side. Though he was lucid, the quickest wit of the curva was suddenly slow and slurring.

  It’s noticeable how often terraces throw up characters who reflect, in some ineffable way, the contours and crevices of a city. The grief about Piero’s illness was profound not just because of his personal situation, but because he seemed to encapsulate all that was best about the Cosenza curva. He, more than anyone, had lived by the motto the Cosenza ultras had once put on a banner: ‘Our happiness will bury you.’ To him, being an ultra was about being a prankster, putting one over people in power, especially the police. It was about getting around the rules to have a laugh with your mates during the party on the terraces.

  Now he was ill, everyone started telling the old stories about him. How, during an away game at Catanzaro, he had smuggled 5,000 balloons in the shape of rabbits into the stadium (the symbol, like a chicken in English, of a coward). Half were red, half yellow. Once in the stadium, everyone inflated them and waved them at the hated local rivals. Another time, he had made the Cosenza goalkeeper, Sorviero, promise to jump the deep, concrete ditch behind the goal into the curva if the team was promoted: there’s a famous photo of the goalkeeper, mid-air, jumping into Piero’s arms. Even the players loved him, they said, and took absurd risks for him. He was constantly doing things to make people laugh, like sending a telegram to a friend who wasn’t replying to his calls: ‘Vu rispunna a su cazzu’ i telefono?’ – ‘Do you want to reply to the fucking phone?’ He lived simply as an irreverent sprite, expressing an instinctive solidarity with any underdog. He would get furious if anyone referred to the homeless men and women he served in the foodbank as ‘hobos’ or ‘bums’. And now he was the underdog, trapped in a deteriorating body, and it felt as if the whole of the curva was mourning the man who never wanted to be its leader.

  Before his illness, Piero’s ‘Monk’s Group’ had become ‘Vino e Gazzosa’ – ‘Wine and soda-water’. The Nuova Guardia had started to call themselves, ironically, the BDD. When one boy was handed back to his mother, the police told her that he had been found amidst a ‘band of druggies and delinquents’, and inevitably the insult stuck. By 2007 two of the most active ultra groups in the city were Rebel Fans and Cosenza Vecchia. Their headquarters were inside a squatted building near the railway station called Rialzo. It was one of those Cosenza spaces that became a home for ex-offenders, the homeless, for immigrants and ultras. It was home to the city’s mosque and became a celebrated concert space, even hosting the Skatalites and Subsonica. ‘Let’s take back the city’ was one of the occupiers’ slogans.

  Those ideals, of course, often came up hard against reality. One of the occupiers’ other slogans was ‘Against heroin, indifference and job insecurity’ but many of the Rebel Fans were struggling with addictions. The squatters were protesting illegality and the incessant ‘cementification’ of the city, and yet found themselves living in the cold, bare concrete as illegals. But just as the ultras inverted everything you thoug
ht you knew about football, so the Cosenza squatters inverted the notion of illegality. The football team that emerged from Rialzo was called Clandestino United. Just as he was being vilified for alleged criminal offences, the squatters spray-painted ‘Long live Padre Fedele’ on the walls. It was like that chant from the terraces repeated at every game: ‘diffidati sempre presenti’ (those who society mistrusts are always, in these spaces, present). The sadness at Piero’s paralysis was tempered by an awareness that, at least, his revolution lived on.

  2 February 2007: Death of Filippo Raciti

  It was the weekend of the Sant’Agata celebrations in Catania, one of the biggest Christian festivals in Europe. The centro storico was candlelit and there was so much wax that young boys were scraping it off the cobbles to make, and sell, new candles. The elegant citizens were eating late-night pastries as the suburbs boomed with fireworks and songs.

  It wasn’t the ideal time for the biggest Sicilian derby for decades: Catania–Palermo in Serie A. The Sant’Agata spectacle was due to go on all weekend, so the Questura had scheduled the match for 6 p.m. on the Friday before the Sant’Agata processions began in earnest.

  Looking back, the mixture of ingredients was so explosive that a tragedy was almost bound to happen. Just the week before, on 27 January 2007, a forty-one-year-old club official from Sammartinese, Ermanno Licursi, was beaten up during a mass brawl at the end of a game against Cancellese. He collapsed and died in the changing room shortly afterwards.

  The Catania ultras were enjoying what Spampinato calls ‘a time of maximum splendour: over the years we had make it clear that Catania wasn’t a land to be conquered, that here it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. If you arrive en bloc, and I want to come and find you, I will.’ There was plenty of previous history between Palermo and Catania. Both sets of fans wanted ‘contact’. It was what Spampinato ‘wanted, studied, looked for and consumed. Game after game, we go and look for it.’ Fighting with Palermo ultras was, for Spampinato, ‘the rule for the red-and-blue ultras’.