Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  Organizationally, the match was a mess. For years, quite a few Catanesi had wandered into the stadium waving just their supermarket loyalty cards. Things had tightened up a bit since the club had gone into Serie A but many toughs could still blag their way into the stadium. Some knew the security men. That was one of the police complaints – that clubs were complicit with ultras because the juicy contract of stadium security was always a compromise between the interests of the president and the ultras.

  That season everyone wanted to be at the stadium. Not only because it was the derby, and in Serie A, but because Catania had been playing fine football. At the beginning of February Catania was fourth in Serie A. Part of the reason was a local attacker called Giuseppe Mascara, a man whose every other goal was a collector’s item.

  Not since Scoglio discovered Schillaci had Sicily produced such an original, lovable top-scorer. But whereas Schillaci was all fire-and-eyes with a furious shot, Mascara was impish. From inside the crowded box away at Catanzaro the previous season, he had scored a goal that was more like a golf-chip. Against Inter, at the San Siro, he had nonchalantly flicked the bouncing ball up with his right boot and speed-lobbed it into the net, leaving the keeper flapping like a fly in a spider’s web. As if any additional spice were needed for the fixture, Mascara had previously played for Palermo, scoring eight goals in thirty-four games.

  Palermo and Catania are separated by 190 kilometres. The Palermo ultras were given a police escort to the city on the other side of the island. But that escort had been ordered to go slow, at a maximum speed of 60 kph. The police plan was that the Palermo ultras would arrive when the match had long-since started, and that they would be so eager to consume the football spectacle that they wouldn’t then go looking for a scrap. The police intelligence was deficient. Any ultra forced to miss half a match would arrive at the stadium alight with righteous anger. All that money they had spent, all the nights planning what to do, what insult to shout, where to seek out the Catanesi and teach them a lesson in their own city… only for the police to get them there with half the game gone. By the time the Palermitani got to the Cibali stadium, they were raring to smash the place up.

  The game was already well underway when, eye-witnesses say, the police fired a tear gas cannister into Spampinato’s Curva Nord at the start of the second half, just as the Palermitani were arriving. The curva dispersed, spreading out like a threatened shoal. The hardest ultras, as always, headed outside. Soon there was so much tear gas in the air that the game had to be suspended.

  The underside of the Curva Nord of the Cibali is like all stadiums: the backside of concrete stairs, large areas of hardstanding, the odd glass booth. There are bushes sprouting from concrete tubs, lots of graffiti against the state. This was where it kicked-off. Now hundreds of Catania ultras were outside and tooled up. Palermitani ablaze at injustice were the enemy. In the middle, the police whom both sides hated for keeping them apart.

  Catania ultras were running backwards and forwards, throwing stones over the transparent shields of the police at the Palermitani. Flares were thrown by the ultras, their orange glows mixing with the scalding tear gas. People grabbed anything they could: loose stones, hub caps, ripped-up asphalt. One kid, a six-foot, sixteen-stone teenager called Antonino Speziale, had gone into the toilets and smashed off a leg supporting a washbasin. Vehicles came steaming into the area, with sirens and sweeping blue lights. It was now a three-way fight.

  Inspector Filippo Raciti arrived at 7.07 p.m. Soon afterwards, the police driver, Salvatore Lazzaro, saw a flare roll under a police Landrover Discovery. He quickly put the vehicle into reverse. On his first witness statement, that driver said: ‘I moved the Discovery a few metres and in that moment I heard a blow on the vehicle and I saw Raciti who was on my left… bring his hands to his head.’ At roughly the same time, Speziale was coming out of the bathroom with the leg of the wash-stand.

  An ambulance was called for Raciti at 8.30 p.m. He had been complaining of dizziness and chest pains for over an hour. It wasn’t certain what had hit him – the reversing vehicle or Speziale’s ceramic bracket. It could have been anything. Visibility was worse than on the Po in winter and the sky was full of flying objects.

  Inspector Raciti died that evening, having said to one of his colleagues: ‘Make sure that bastard pays, the one with that hair, robust, the Questura knows who he is.’ Raciti implied he had seen who had hurt him, but he couldn’t name him.

  His funeral was held on the Monday, 5 February. The Catania ultras hung out a large banner: ‘The real Catania is that which weeps for its son, not for who kills him. We are Catania.’ In private, though, many ultras were saying the opposite. Many would echo what one said, bluntly, in Giuseppe Scandurra’s Tifo Estremo: ‘What I’ve got to say about what happened in Catania is short but very clear: one–nil to the ultras. We, and there are many of us, have never forgotten Carlo [Giuliani, killed at Genova’s G8] and all the other dirty deeds they have done to us. I just hope this is only the beginning… death to cops.’

  The crackdown was swift. Fifteen fans were arrested, four of them minors. Amongst them was an activist in the neo-fascist organization, Forza Nuova. One ultra group, the ANR (the ‘Non-Recognized Association’), was found to be holding guns. The house of the stadium’s custodian was raided, revealing baseball bats, ball-bearings and a sweatshirt emblazoned with ‘ACAB’ (an acronym for ‘All Cops are Bastards’). The custodian was so incensed by the raid that he screamed at the police, ‘Go away, you’re just a fistful of bastards and villains. They did a good job throwing bombs at you. They should have killed all of you.’

  That defiance was echoed by other ultras interviewed in the aftermath of Raciti’s death. ‘What we really want to say to all those who behave as if we don’t exist is “here we are”,’ said one. ‘Not only do we exist, but we’re able to break your arse whenever and however we want.’ Another fan underlined how much the police were now, more than rival fans, the intended enemy: ‘At the stadium we always win because we don’t go to watch the game but to fight the police.’

  In this respect Catania ultras were no different to most others. There was, by now, a visceral distrust of the state and the police amongst Italian football’s toughest fans. That ACAB acronym was now common all over Italy, especially around the stadiums. Sbirri – cops – were the butt of much urban graffiti. Policemen escorting ultras were used to listening to one almost-military song, sung aggressively in their faces: ‘As soon as I arrive in the police station, the cop should tremble. The law doesn’t scare us, the state won’t stop us, we will not stop, because everyone knows the life of the ultra knows only two laws, violence and attitude.’ That hatred for the police was particularly problematic on an island where the Mafia’s law of antagonistic silence was always hard to break. It seemed to many as if the ultras were driving a wedge into the fragile cooperation between police and the people. Although they claimed to be different from the professional criminals, the ultras were serving their purpose, creating a hatred and suspicion of the police that could only hinder the fight against the Mafia. It showed an overlap of attitudes between the organized fans and organized crime.

  The authorities were desperate to find a guilty party. They had watched all the CCTV from the 2 February riots and had seen Antonino Speziale – in his ‘Champion’ sweatshirt – emerging from the loos with the basin stand. When they looked into his background, he seemed to fit the bill. He was a regular around the stadium, attending a technical college fifty metres from the ground. He was part of a group called the Skizzati, ‘the squirted’ or ‘splattered’. He had the symbol of Catania Calcio, an elephant, tattooed on his right arm. Speziale, by then seventeen, was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter.

  It wasn’t only the ultras, however, who were convinced that the police had the wrong boy. He wasn’t a football nut but a rugby player, ‘all fat and no brain’ according to a friend. He had a huge, pock-marked face and he was always the one in the grou
p people took the piss out of. If anything, he seemed a bit of a softie, helping out his grandmother at her florist’s booth. He was the sort of dim underdog led astray because he longed to be included in the gang. He admitted taking part in the riot but he was adamant that he hadn’t killed Inspector Raciti.

  The forensics reports were inconclusive. The RIS (a forensic investigation unit) in Parma doubted, in its tortuous prose, that the basin stand could have caused the fatal injury: ‘Whilst not being able to express a definitive diagnosis, the hypothesis of its unfitness seems to reunite the major probabilities.’ Even more damaging for the prosecution was the fact that RIS revealed that they had found, on Raciti’s protective vest, ‘fragments of a blue colour which are made of a modified acrylic resin with nitrocellulose and with a large presence of titanium bioxide…’ The implication was clear – Raciti may well have been hit, and killed, by the reversing blue Discovery.

  For years ultras all over Italy had held onto that description of ‘fragments of blue resin’ as evidence of their generic innocence and of the stupidity of the police. Although Speziale was found guilty at all three levels of Italian justice, and sentenced to eight years, the ‘Speziale Libero’ slogan (‘Free Speziale’) quickly caught on, becoming shorthand for support of ultras and hatred of the ‘forces of order’.

  The ultras had always relished having bad taste. Being offensive was part of their famous ‘mentality’. Now a new chant, reinventing that famous line about astonishing feats at Catania’s stadium, celebrated the suspicion that Raciti had actually been killed by his own colleague reversing the Landrover. ‘Sensational news from Cibali [Catania’s ground],’ they sang. ‘They’ve run him over with a Discovery’.

  11 November 2007, Arezzo

  The hatred between the ultras and the ‘forces of order’ might have dissipated over time if another death that year hadn’t made it far greater. Gabriele Sandri, or ‘Gabbo’, was a twenty-six-year-old DJ from a smart suburb of Rome called Balduina. He was a tall, gingery-blond with a big smile. He was always well dressed. His father had a fashion store and he liked showing off his latest tattoos. His mother was a casting director in Cinecittà, and Gabbo had seen all the old Italian comedies set around his own city. Now, as a DJ, he was beginning to get gigs all over the country, especially in Sardinia during the long summer.

  Gabbo was a Lazio nut. He had come of age watching the golden years of the early noughties: Sven Goran Eriksson’s tough but exciting team of winners. He had a Vikings scarf but had been on Irriducibili marches too, like the one protesting against the sale of Beppe Signori to Parma in 1994. He was friends with one or two of the Under-21 players who had been to his sets. Many of his friends were part of In Basso a Destra (‘Bottom Right’, a name which hinted not just at where they stood on the curva but also at their grass-roots far-rightism).

  The night before the game he was at the decks in the Piper nightclub until almost sunrise. He went home, had a quick shower and went out again, meeting his mates in Piazza Vescovio outside the Excalibur pub. Nine of them, in two cars, were heading to Milano to see the Lazio game against Inter. Gabbo got into the grey Renault Scénic, driven by his friend Marco, known as ‘Ovo’. Ovo was a member of the neo-fascist organization Forza Nuova and had been arrested by police for carrying a knife at a Lazio game in April 2006.

  After a couple of hours, they stopped in a service station, Badia al Pino Est, southwest of the Tuscan city of Arezzo. In the same service station were five Juventus fans from the Juventus Club di Roma. They were on their way to support Juventus at Parma. Insults between the two were inevitable and the ultra code called for the insult to be avenged physically. There was a zuffa, a ‘struggle’ or ‘scrap’: shouts, fists, kicks.

  On the far side of the motorway, a traffic cop had heard the fight. He put on his siren and ran up the bank to see more. The ultras quickly dispersed, the Juventini getting back into their car and, as they sped off, opening a door to knock one of Gabbo’s mates over. The Laziali chased the car on foot, hoping to smash a window, but it was gone. The fight was over almost as quickly as it had started.

  Gabbo was in the back of the Scénic, sitting in the middle between his two mates. Just as the car was pulling away, the traffic cop, Luigi Spaccarotella, screamed at them to stop. It was 9.18 a.m. Spaccarotella was over-excited and pulled out his Beretta 92SB, a semi-automatic pistol. The car was 66 metres away. The bullet, travelling at 385 metres a second, left a tiny hole in the side of the Scénic and entered Gabbo’s neck. The other passengers barely realized what had happened. There was a faint noise and nothing more.

  By the time the other lads understood, they were already racing north on the motorway. Gabbo was slumped, wheezing, and blood was coming out of his mouth and neck. They called an ambulance and pulled off at the next exit. Marco was so anxious that he smashed through the barriers of the motorway pay-booth. The doors of the car were thrown open and the paramedics moved in but there was nothing to do. Gabbo had died.

  Before lunch that Sunday, the news of his death was made public. A press release from the police suggested that their officer had merely fired in the air but that official line was quickly ridiculed. There were plenty of eye-witnesses who had seen Spaccarotella plant his feet, straighten his arms and take aim. Word got around very quickly and as ultras were journeying to their games, they stoked each other’s anger with stories about earlier police slayings.

  The ultras never denied being violent. But they were adamant that there was violence on both sides and the lack of consistency in reporting and punishing that violence infuriated them. Back in February 2007 the entire league had been suspended to mourn Inspector Raciti. The idea that the same thing wouldn’t happen now that the roles were reversed – a policeman killing an ultra – seemed illogical. Inter ultras, twinned with Laziali, unfurled a banner within hours of Gabbo’s death: ‘For Raciti you stop the league, the death of a fan has no meaning.’ Parma fans raised an egalitarian banner, echoing the one written in 1993 for another alleged victim of police violence: ‘La morte è uguale per tutti’ (‘Death is the same for everyone’).

  The most violent protests were in Bergamo and Rome. Il Bocia and his Atalanta ultras in Bergamo decided to stop the game at any cost. A few minutes into the home game against Milan, two dozen hooded ultras, with scarves covering their faces, started kicking the inch-thick plexiglass between themselves and the grass. It billowed like clingfilm, eventually shattering in two places. Soon there were two big holes. After a quick consultation with the players and police, the game was called off.

  In screaming for the games to be postponed out of respect for a dead fan, the ultras were assuming an original position. Until the early noughties, they had proudly been the most demented devotees at the football temple. But now, as with the ‘derby of the dead baby’, they were actually sometimes agitating for games not to go ahead. It was like an alcoholic not just passing a pub, but protesting against it. They, of all people, were asking that the football juggernaut occasionally pause and mourn. It was both logical and paradoxical: they didn’t see themselves as apostates but as the faithful resacralizing games by violently stopping them.

  That evening there were serious riots in both Rome and Milano. Even those who had never known Gabbo felt he was one of them. The Roma–Cagliari match was supposed to be an evening kick-off and by late afternoon 400 fans – both Romanisti and Laziali – were marauding. Between the Stadio Olimpico and Ponte Milvio, the pedestrian bridge over the Tiber, skips and motorbikes were overturned, a bus was set alight, the offices of CONI (the Italian International Olympic Committee) were invaded, and its windows, computers and clocks smashed. Three police stations were besieged. Although chaotic, it seemed well-organized. ‘It’s not easy to attack three police stations and the offices of CONI,’ said one Home Office minister, ‘unless you’ve got a military strategy.’

  The police had always been seen by ultras as the armed wing of the Establishment, and since ultras saw themselves as the armed
wing of the resistance, it was inevitable that the two would come to blows. As Valerio Marchi wrote in his essay, ‘I am an ultra and I’m against’: ‘For the police the ultra is a figure to control and repress because he’s subversive, and not because of what [crimes] he could commit. For the ultra, the police are part of a third tribe which wears the coat of the system and which beats up, arrests and issues restriction orders not to restabilize order but to defend their interests.’ It’s a point of view repeated by almost everyone within the movement. As one of the characters says in Nanni Balestrini’s novella, I Furiosi: ‘The police, too, are ultra gangs, so are the Carabinieri, and as with us they too have groups which are more tight-knit and which always want to fight.’

  If an increased politicization of the terraces created divisions (both internally, within the same terrace, and within the movement as a whole), hatred of the police united all political sides of the terraces, from far right to far left. They would sing ‘Landslide, a terrace landslide on the Italian police, a terrace landslide on those sons-of-bitches’, a song written by Erode, a left-wing post-punk band from Como. From the outside, that visceral disdain for the police appeared Mafia-like, delegitimizing law-enforcement and refusing all cooperation with it. But from within the ultra world, the disdain was born of a profound sense of injustice. They would point to a long list of victims of police brutality: Giuseppe Plaitano killed by another police bullet in April 1963, the Trieste fan Stefano Furlan who died of brain injuries inflicted by a police truncheon in 1984, the Atalanta fan Celestino Colombi slain by a heart attack after a police charge in 1993. Exactly the same thing had happened to Fabio Di Maio, a Treviso fan in 1998. Alessandro Spoletini, a Roma fan, had spent a month in a coma after a brutal truncheoning in 2001. For months newspapers reported the case as one of ultra, rather than police, brutality. Brescia ultra Paolo Scaroni, a farmer and rock-climber, was savaged by police in Verona in 2005 when no disturbances were taking place. He too spent a month in a coma and, when an investigation was eventually begun, it became apparent that witness statements had been doctored and CCTV footage was missing. Years later a court found that his had been a ‘gratuitous and unmotivated beating’ but since police wore no identification, it was impossible to determine the guilty party. ‘The thing which hurts most,’ he said in an interview years later with Espresso, ‘is that they’ve deleted my childhood and adolescence. I’ve lost all the memories of the first twenty years of my existence.’