Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  The reason for the meeting was obscure. Coming four days before Lazio played Genoa, it appeared an opportunity to agree what should happen in that game and, presumably, to distribute the cash required to make it happen. The meeting was photographed because magistrates in Cremona were investigating a match-fixing syndicate. There were investors from Singapore and Hungarian, Albanian, Macedonian and Italian criminals who had established contact with footballers in Serie B and A. An investigating magistrate later wrote that there were ‘significant elements to affirm that Sculli, just before Lazio–Genoa of May 2011, took on the role of “collector” of a notable sum of money to fix the match.’ Sculli, the magistrates noted in their roundabout way, ‘isn’t extraneous to the world of organized crime’. Before the game, there were an astonishing number of phone calls between players and criminals, referring cryptically to the delivery of ‘watches’ or ‘documents’. Two days after the main meeting in the Coccio restaurant, Safet Altic met the Genoa midfielder Omar Milanetto in Bar Groove in the city centre.

  Subsequent confessions revealed that the game would be 1–1 at half-time, and that there would be more than four goals scored overall (it finished 4–2). The bookmaker, SKS365, received (and duly denounced) an anomalous volume of wagers on precisely that result. Even without the hindsight of confessions and investigative wiretaps, it was obvious to anyone who watched the game that it was a strangely meek encounter. Many of the opposing players that day knew each other from having played together in Modena years before. Once the 1–1 score had been reached by the twelfth minute, the players stopped attacking. ‘There’s little freneticism,’ bemused commentators said, ‘so many errors in passing, even from good players… it’s an incredible thing… they’re passing the ball around ad infinitum…’

  Two days after the game, on 16 May 2011, there was a meeting in Milano involving Sculli, two Genoa players and many of the criminal fixers. It was, one assumes, a chance to settle accounts and maybe even agree future fixes.

  Within weeks of that infamous Lazio–Genoa game, the calcioscommesse (‘football betting’) scandal broke and various players were arrested. At first eighteen clubs and twenty-six players were under investigation. But the scandal kept getting bigger and a second investigation, called ‘Cremona-bis’, involved twenty-two clubs and sixty-one players. A third one (‘Cremona-ter’) looked into thirteen clubs and thirty-five players. Other trials with multiple accused began in Bari, Naples and in Bari again. There were a fourth and fifth investigation in Cremona, and another one in Genoa. Every thread that was pulled seemed to unravel the seams of the footballing world and reveal a sordid world of cash and duplicity. Sporting heroes like Beppe Signori and Cristiano Doni suddenly seemed very different. In the words of one of the cynical fixers, Hristiyan Ilievski, it appeared that Italian football ‘wasn’t a game but a compromise’.

  The country had always had a problem with match-fixing (there were similar scandals in 1980 and 1986), partly because it was a particularly attractive scam for organized crime: although the financial rewards were great, the punishments were, as with ticket-touting, minimal. ‘It’s the cleanest dirty business in the world,’ joked Ilievski. Both a prosecutor in Bari and the head of Fifa’s security commission estimated that €12 billion was bet through unofficial channels on Italian football every year.

  The vast majority of ultra groups were aghast at the revelations of match-fixing. For them, buying or selling games was just another example of how they had been betrayed by greedy players. The scandal merely underlined the ultras’ conviction that, with so much wrong in the sport, it was absurd to scapegoat them alone. But because they invariably occupied that grey area between legality and illegality, and often had contacts with both players and the underworld, it was perhaps inevitable that some groups would be drawn into the money-making wheeze. One of the match-fixers called Genoa ‘our Gomorrah’, and the strange meetings there spoke for themselves. But in Bari, too, the ultras saw a chance to turn a profit. Since the club in that 2010–11 season was as good as relegated (and match-fixing invariably took place towards the end of a season when mid-table clubs had little to play for and others were desperate for points), three capo-ultras approached the players. ‘You’re bottom,’ they said (remembered the club captain when interviewed by police). ‘You’ve had a shit season. Tomorrow you’ve got to lose. Basta.’ One of the players was slapped. Another eye-witness remembered the threats. ‘Until now we’ve let you live peacefully even if the team has been shit and you’re practically relegated. We haven’t broken your balls, we let you go out in the evenings with your families. But now you’ve got to give us a hand, the music is changing…’

  The players allege that they told Bari’s sporting director of the threats and that his advice was to ‘close your eyes and shut your mouth’. The team lost the next two matches 1–0, away to Cesena and at home to Sampdoria. Three weeks later, one of the players at the centre of the match-fixing scandal, Andrea Masiello, deliberately scored an own-goal in the derby between Bari and Lecce to give Bari’s closest rivals a 2–0 victory.

  13 December 2011, Florence

  Until the 1990s, Italy had been an almost exclusively monocultural and monoracial society. In the 1981 census there were only 321,000 foreigners in the country. By 1991 that number had almost doubled and in the 2001 census there were 1,334,889 non-Italians officially resident in Italy, with far more living as ‘clandestines’. By 2015 the official figure went above five million for the first time. The consequence for ultra groups – many of which were becoming stridently right-wing and nationalist – was an almost complete inversion of the movement’s founding ideals. Where before the terraces gathered many of society’s excluded, now they seemed to unite against the racially different. Rather than offering belonging, certain terraces became bulwarks against those who, they said, didn’t belong.

  Incidents of what’s known as ‘squadrismo’ were increasingly common. One anti-fascist watchdog counted, between 2005 and 2008, 330 acts of fascist aggression. In 2009 Blocco Studentesco – CasaPound’s youth movement – came to Rome’s central square, Piazza Navona, armed with truncheons painted with the Italian tricolour, which they used to beat up left-wing students. When one TV programme criticized Blocco Studentesco its offices were ‘occupied’ by CasaPound militants. Two years later that atmosphere of hatred led, inevitably, to the loss of innocent lives. On 13 December 2011 Gianluca Casseri, a militant in the CasaPound base in Pistoia, left home with a Magnum 357 in his bag. He was a taciturn loner, fifty-years-old, rotund with short, grey hair. He was a self-published author, writing a biography of the Italian neo-Nazi intellectual Adriano Romualdi (son of a former MSI president and protégé of Julius Evola) and a fantasy novel, The Keys of Chaos. On that December morning Casseri had a clear plan: to shoot as many immigrants as possible. He went to Piazza Dalmazia and, at 12.30 p.m., killed two Senegalese men, Samb Modou and Diop Mor. He shot another man, Moustapha Dieng, in the back and throat and then drove off in his blue VW Polo. Just over two hours later Casseri was at the city’s central market, where he shot Sougou Mor and Mbenghe Cheike, who survived the attack. He then turned his gun on himself in the market’s underground car park.

  Sometimes the attacks on immigrants were a calculated warning by organized crime. When six innocent bystanders – from Ghana, Togo and Liberia – were killed in the ‘Castel Volturno slaughter’ in 2008, it was interpreted as a warning by the Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra, against the activism and entrepreneurialism of the immigrant community. Racism certainly played a part but it was as much old-fashioned criminal marking of territorial control for commercial exploitation. But often the violence was sheer and senseless hatred. Between 2011 and 2014, fifty-nine Bengali men and women were admitted to hospitals in Rome with severe cuts and fractures since one of the games played by Forza Nuova militants was to find a solitary Asian person and, as a group, attack them. As one militant proudly boasted, it was like having a coffee after a meal: ‘At the end of the even
ing we do a Bengali.’

  22 April 2012, Genoa

  Sometimes they managed to storm the bastille: not just take control of the streets, but of the stadium as well.

  The Genoa–Siena match was, from a Genoa point of view, going terribly. The club was close to relegation and, despite playing at home, found itself 3–0 down to Siena by half-time. The ultras in the gradinata nord were shouting and gesturing. It wasn’t the usual co-ordinated singing but individual shouts as if there were rebellion in the air.

  In the fourth minute of the second half Siena scored a fourth goal and the ultras started moving. The head of the stewarding operation realized it was becoming dangerous and decided to pull his stewards out of the gradinata. But when the door was opened, about two hundred ultras, led by Cobra and Cyclops, burst through. They forced the next gate into the main stand. Soon they were centre stage, standing on the plexiglass above the pitch. Theirs was a montage of rage and intensity: the unison chants, the identical gestures of arms going backwards and forwards in the air. Flares and paper bombs were being thrown onto the grass. In the eighth minute the referee suspended the game.

  The Siena players walked to the changing rooms but the Genoa players couldn’t. Cobra and his mates were standing on the white players’ tunnel, its ribs bending like an accordion. The Genoa players were in the centre-circle with police, journalists and club officials. Suddenly, the ultras seemed to be in charge. They were jabbing their fingers at the grass in front of them as a summons. ‘Come here, pieces of shit,’ they shouted. Some made throat-slitting gestures. ‘We are Genoa,’ they said. ‘We’ll come and get you tonight by the seaside,’ Cyclops bellowed. ‘We’ll see you this evening.’

  The tableau was hypnotic. The commoners – a dark mass of men dressed in shades, hoodies and jeans – had complete control of the aristocrats of a Serie A game. The Sky commentator called it ‘surreal and grotesque’. Marco Rossi, the club captain, walked over to the group that was now chanting rhythmically: ‘We are Genoa!’ The ultras demanded that the players remove their shirts because they weren’t worthy to wear the colours. The commentator from RAI (the state broadcaster) tried his best to sympathize with the ultras. ‘Fans’ anger should always be listened to,’ he said. ‘It’s always the fruit of great love… even hatred is the child of too much love.’

  Enrico Preziosi, the club president, was on the pitch, concerned that the club would be docked points if the game couldn’t continue. He agreed that the players should remove their shirts, a symbolic surrender to the ultras. Rossi took off his shirt. Other players did the same and Rossi gathered them up. One player was crying. ‘There’s great sadness in these images,’ the RAI commentator said. ‘This is a command, it’s blackmail, it’s intimidation.’

  The symbolism of that afternoon was eloquent. Young players were crying and denuded, standing far below older men who were threatening them with violence. But Beppe Sculli – the Calabrian with underworld connections and a match-fixing history, who had now returned to Genoa from Lazio – refused to remove his shirt. What might have appeared brave defiance was actually a meeting of minds. He climbed up towards the top of the players’ tunnel and he and Cobra put their heads together, arms around the back of each other’s heads, whispering. ‘Sculli is one of us,’ the ultras started shouting. Sculli, having spoken to Puffer on a club official’s phone, persuaded the ultras to end their protest. He shouted at his captain to take the shirts back to the players. The game was back on.

  As with so many iconic events involving the ultras, it could be read in diametrically opposing ways. On the one hand, the Genoans had merely done what every ultra group in Italy dreamt of doing: they had publicly reasserted that the shirt was more sacred than the overpaid players, even more sacred than the sport itself. They had defended the colours of the city against humiliation and, apart from barging a few stewards out of the way, hadn’t committed any crime. ‘It was the most civil protest,’ Puffer told me, ‘there’s ever been in the world of football.’ Many remembered the words of Fabrizio De André, the Genovese singer-songwriter, who in his brief scribblings about fandom once wrote that ‘an easily influenced individual, who is continuously taught by society that life is only a knife-fight for survival, will easily become a fanatic… and will consider defeat as a personal tragedy caused by others and against which he will carry out acts of violence either before the defeat to avert it, or afterwards to avenge it.’

  Others, though, felt that the afternoon finally exposed the intimidation that had always bubbled in the background of ultra life. Just a few months before, the ultras had surrounded the players at training and, according to some, had so taken against a player that he was sold. Preziosi, in a press conference after that Siena game, gave his version: ‘We’ve always been scared of these people: “I’ll grab you”, “I’ll split you”, “I’ll break you”. They come to your home, they come to the stadium, they slap the players. They know everything about everything. We accompany them with a sense of unease but also with fear.’ They were the ‘evil of Genoa’, he said, and should be in prison.

  Events over the following months persuaded many that Preziosi’s analysis was close to the mark. The fear instilled by the ultras was such that only one of the stewards present that day dared identify the protagonists to the police. A few months later, one of the leaders of the Genoa–Siena insurrection – a Sicilian with convictions for drug-dealing who was later caught up in a drugs murder – was arrested for beating up a car mechanic for having not done some repairs fast enough. He and his brother had so much blood on their shoes and clothing that they pretended they had fallen off their moped.

  Since that ultra was the son of a Sicilian mafioso, it began to appear, not for the first time, that the ultras were surrounded not just by petty criminals but by the professionals. The Italian parliament’s anti-Mafia commission published a report in December 2017 entitled ‘Football and Mafia’, in which it pointed to Genoa as an example of ‘the acquisition by a section of ultra groups of the methods of organized crime’. The Commission interviewed the Genova District Attorney, Francesco Cozzi, who said that the ultras ‘impose themselves through implicit threats… by their characteristics and because of their pedigree. Applying the mechanisms of organized crime, they exercise an intimidatory power to influence the decisions of the club.’

  The ultras’ ability to suspend games, though still rare, was becoming more common and more creative. On 10 November 2013 the Salernitana–Nocerina derby produced a parody that no one had ever seen before. Within fifty seconds of the kick-off, the manager of Nocerina had made three substitutions. Then, in the next twenty-one minutes of play, one Nocerina player after another fell to the turf, clinging calves and ribs. Because the total number of allowed substitutions had been made, there were no replacements so the away team was reduced to ten men, then nine. When the number got to six, the referee was obliged by the rules to abandon the game. At that moment, a plane flew overhead with a banner trailing behind. In red capital letters it said ‘Respect Nocerina and her Ultras’.

  The back-story was that the Nocerina ultras had been banned from the match, even though thousands had acquired the tessera, or ‘supporters’ card’. They were so incensed that they somehow persuaded the players to feign injuries. The method of persuasion was the mystery. It was easy for national media to portray Nocerina as a site of Mafia-like intimidation, not least because of completely unrelated deaths there. The father of the club owner had been killed in gang warfare years before, and one of the club’s leading ultras was shot dead just a month before that iconic non-game.

  But the ultras told a very different story. They were on good terms with the players, who wanted to show solidarity with their supporters. There had been no threats, only pleas. Aniello Califano’s memoir of being a Nocerina ultra put his finger on why going to a game mattered so much: ‘Those colours for us are our freedom; they are our victory against the time…’ The terraces were where they could redeem all the wrongs they h
ad endured: ‘We are our land, long-suffering, exploited, scorned but unique, loved and full of real life. And that’s why, so long ago, we made our flag from our own anger.’ If the ultras couldn’t go to a game, they would make sure no one else could either.

  Present Day: Verona v. Cosenza

  Blue lights illuminate the way to the stadium like a runway. There are metal-plated vans and unmarked cars with rotating blue lights parked up at the motorway exit and at the roundabouts. Police officers stand in groups of a dozen, with helmets, visors, leg-guards and truncheons. The car park for away fans is a cage. A metal gate is slid open and closed behind each car and coach.

  These sorts of cemented spaces with little history or meaning – motorway service stations, car parks, ferry-port forecourts – are the natural habitats of the ultras. The soulless backdrops make what Durkheim called the ‘collective effervescence’ all the more evident. The ultras bring their colours to the grey spaces, their energy to the passive, they bring their sense of rootedness and belonging to places that are, by their very nature, temporary shelters for itinerants. Maybe that’s why, on all our away-trips, we never stop at the sea or a lake or a mountain. It would take the attention away from ourselves, from the effect we have on these dull canvasses. And there’s a relish in the self-perception of being the urban underclass, the cockroaches who inhabit the darkest corners and only come out to spook the salubrious salons of straight society. In this grey suburbia it sometimes seems as if the football pitch is the only patch of lush, verdant turf left.