Ultra

by Tobias Jones

  In 2013 two Calabrians were holding a series of meetings to seek permission to set up their own ultra gang. Saverio Dominello and his son, Rocco, were suspected of being part of the Rosarno clan involved in extortion in small towns between Turin and Milano. They had got mixed up in nightclubs, narcotics and even attempted murder. Saverio was a man of few words but Rocco was often described as garbato, ‘smooth’ or ‘graceful’.

  From recorded conversations in the spring of that year, investigators realized that the Dominello family were planning to move in on the ticket-touting business in Turin and form their own ultra group called the Gobbi (‘hunchbacks’ being the pejorative name for supporters of the ‘old lady’). Since the ultra world was as territorial as drug-dealing, Saverio and Rocco Dominello knew that they had to tread carefully. ‘If the plate is round,’ Saverio Dominello was recorded as saying, ‘it’ll be cut five ways.’ This was old-fashioned spartizione: slicing up the profits between different cartels.

  Slowly, other interested parties were sounded out. Loris Grancini, the head of the Viking Ultras, gave his assent. ’Ndrangheta strongholds in the South gave their agreement. The man fronting the new ultra group, who was under police surveillance, boasted over the phone about having the support of Mafia clans: ‘We’ve got our backs covered, we’ve got the Christians who count. What the fuck more do you want?’ There was just one more man who needed to give his blessing, the man the police called the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of the ultra world, Pino Coldheart of the Drughi.

  On 20 April 2013 the Dominellos and their sidekicks held a meeting with Coldheart. The Dominellos arrived with ostentatious humility in a Fiat 500; Coldheart rolled up in a Series 1 BMW. They met in the Caffetteria del Portico in Montanaro for almost two hours. A police listening device was hidden in one of the sidekick’s cars and they heard boasts about the power of the nascent Gobbi: ‘You’ve had the honour to sit at table with Coldheart… no one can touch you. You’re the number one… you can dictate the law if anyone behaves badly.’

  The next day, in a crunch match against Milano on 21 April 2013, the new Juventus group announced itself with a huge banner in the stadium. The B’s of ‘Gobbi’ were back-to-front, looking like ‘88’, which many neo-fascists use as code to refer to HH, or ‘Heil Hitler’ – H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. The Calabrian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, now had its own ultra firm inside the stadium of Italy’s biggest football team.

  The smooth Rocco Dominello quickly became extraordinarily influential amongst both Juventus officials and different ultra groups. He was introduced to Stefano Merulla, the man responsible for Juventus’s ticket office. He became an apparently intimate friend of the Juventus security manager, Alessandro D’Angelo, addressing him as ‘Ale’. By June 2013 Dominello was giving him orders. When D’Angelo told Dominello that the rival Viking’s allocation of tickets had been reduced, Dominello said arrogantly, ‘Like I told you to.’ Dominello boasted to the club’s security manager that people ‘are scared of me’. He once even received tickets directly from the director-general and arranged a face-to-face meeting with him.

  Juventus did nothing to halt Dominello’s rise. In January 2014 a Swiss citizen complained to the club that he had paid €620 for a ticket worth officially €140. Internal checks by the club proved that the ticket had been supplied to Dominello by D’Angelo. A week after the Swiss fan’s complaint, D’Angelo squared the situation, telling Dominello that they would find a way to get him tickets using ‘a different code’. Bucci’s friend, Merulla, was beginning to have suspicions about Dominello: ‘I don’t know what job he has, I don’t know what influence he has…’ He seemed, said Merulla, ‘mysteriously powerful’ – often code, in Italy, for mafioso.

  Part of the problem was that Juventus’ security manager didn’t seem very good at security. He had been appointed, in part, due to a childhood friendship with the Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli (they had grown up together since D’Angelo’s father had been the chauffeur to Agnelli’s father, Umberto). Investigators were wiretapping his phone, and as you read the transcripts of D’Angelo’s sweary, sloppy conversations, it becomes clear that he was doing little to distance himself from the tough-nut ultras and was turning a blind eye to their darker dealings. One judge later wrote that D’Angelo and Juventus appeared to behave with ‘subjection and submission’ with regard to Rocco Dominello.

  Through 2014 the ultras were becoming more menacing. For the Juventus–Torino derby that spring, Pino Coldheart called a fans’ strike in a show of power to the Juventus hierarchy. The pretext for the strike was the stadium bans that various ultras had received after fights with Atalanta fans, but the reality was that the Drughi wanted to receive more tickets and at cheaper prices. For years, D’Angelo had looked to Ciccio Bucci as the go-between to shore up the Juventus-ultras compromise but now he phoned the Calabrian, Rocco Dominello, instead: ‘I want you [ultras] to be calm, and us [Juventus] to be calm, and we’ll travel together.’

  Bucci must have sensed that his influence was on the wane. Dominello had become the main interface between the club and the ultras. At the end of that season Bucci was beaten up by Pino Coldheart. Nobody knows the reason, though it seems a logical speculation that either Pino had discovered Bucci was working as an informant or that he simply wanted him out of the way. Bucci was so spooked by the beating that he decided to leave Turin, going back to Puglia for a year. He lost eight kilos and told his ex-wife that people were trying to ‘take him out’. His phone was no longer ringing and, back in San Severo, he spent much of his time caring for, and arguing with, his ageing parents. It seemed as if he was losing everything he loved.

  3 May 2014: Coppa Italia Final

  On 3 May 2014 Napoli was playing in the Italian cup final against Fiorentina. Managed by Rafa Benítez, it was a strong team with the free-scoring Argentinian Gonzalo Higuaín up-front and Paolo Cannavaro bossing the defence.

  On the Saturday afternoon before the game, a convoy of coaches was stop-starting along Viale di Tor di Quinto in Rome. You could see, in the windows, the light-blue flags and scarves of Napoli fans. In the 1980s there had been a twinning between Roma and Napoli. Roma’s Fedayn had even been guests in the Neapolitan stadium’s Curva B. But then Roma’s Boys had attacked Napoli fans and deliberately broken the friendship, and ever since there had been hatred between the two.

  The Napoli fans saw someone run towards one of the coaches and throw something underneath. The explosion was so loud that it seemed to rock the whole vehicle. Suddenly, there was smoke pouring out from underneath the chassis. Napoli fans were piling out of nearby coaches. It was just a paper bomb and there was no damage done but now the fans were on the streets, exposed. They saw a group of men in helmets and balaclavas jeering at them from a sidestreet. Ciro, a thirty-one-year-old man who had a carwash outlet in Napoli, led the chase.

  Ten seconds later there were four syncopated shots. The noise – cold and metallic – ripped through the streets. Ciro fell sideways. The bullets from the Beretta had torn through his arm, his lungs and lodged in his spinal cord. Two other men were injured.

  ‘Il chiattone, il chiattone,’ Napoli fans shouted. ‘The fat man.’ They rushed him and he lifted his gun again but it jammed. The fans moved in on him, hammering him with their fists but he was so insulated in flesh – and some thought he must be high – that nothing seemed to hurt him.

  ‘Give it to me harder,’ he shouted. ‘I don’t feel it.’

  Ciro was carried back to the main road. He was sagging badly and his friends tried to get his rucksack off his back. Police arrived. A helicopter was stuttering overhead. An ambulance took Ciro to hospital. The shocked fans in the coaches saw police leading away the suspect.

  After that, it was surreal to go to a game of football. Napoli won 3–1 but the memorable image from the match was a Napoli ultra – nicknamed ‘The Swine’ – sitting on the railings at the centre of the terrace, screaming at the players to stop the game. He had inked arms outstre
tched and a black T-shirt saying ‘Speziale Libero’.

  Ciro slipped in and out of consciousness over the next seven weeks. Lazio ultras paid for his mother to stay in a hotel so that she could be with her son. Slurring his words, he identified from photographs the man who had shot him. It was a forty-six-year-old called Daniele De Santis. Ciro Esposito died of multiple organ failure at the end of June.

  De Santis was well-known to police. Nicknamed Gastone, and with ‘Roma’ and ‘SPQR’ tattooed on his knuckles, he was a Roma ultra who liked to think of himself as a modern-day Roman legionary. He had been present at the riots in Brescia in 1994 and had previously been accused of threats to the Roma club hierarchy. He lived in the same street where Ciro had been shot, surrounded by runes, Celtic crosses and posters of fascist martyrs,. He had spent the previous night snorting cocaine with two prostitutes. He was convicted and sentenced to twenty-six years in prison, reduced on appeal to sixteen.

  In Napoli, as the city mourned Ciro Esposito, his relatives were adamant that they wanted no revenge or violence in his name. Graffiti in blue lettering around the city reiterated the point. ‘Scampia [his suburb] doesn’t want revenge, only justice’ said one, ‘You can’t die of love’ another. His mother, Antonella Leardi, was softly spoken but resolute: ‘I’ve always said it and always will: the ambush in Tor di Quinto was a fascist and racist ambush.’

  In a communiqué, Roma’s Curva Sud attempted to distance itself from the act: ‘For us the death of Ciro Esposito is an abnormal tragedy which, for the way it came about, is beyond the bounds of the ultra world.’ But loyalty didn’t allow Roma’s Curva Sud to distance itself from the murderer: ‘The Curva Sud remains and always will remain at the side of its son, we will never renege on our brother, whether right or wrong. This is what life, and the street, has taught us.’ There were long banners pouring scorn on Ciro’s grieving mother (‘How sad to turn a profit from a funeral using books and interviews’). Years later, when Roma ultras went to Liverpool – on the occasion in 2018 when the Irish Liverpool fan, Sean Cox, was punched and reduced to a coma – a banner saying ‘DDS [Daniele De Santis] With Us’ was held up as if the murderer were an icon for the terraces.

  2014: Lucca–Luhansk

  Andrea Palmeri liked to call himself the ‘Generalissimo’. He was the leader of an ultra group from Lucca, in Tuscany, called Bulldog. The group drew in elements from all the far-right parties, from CasaPound, Forza Nuova and the Skins, and they spray-painted slogans like ‘Hitler for 100 years’ and ‘Priebke is a Hero’ on churches working with refugees. Most collected knives, tattoos and convictions for assault, fighting less against other fans than their political enemies. In 2014 Palmeri was on trial for conspiracy, grievous bodily harm, aggravated assault and possession of a knife.

  Palmeri was facing the probability of a custodial sentence and decided to drive his BMW 3,000 kilometres away, to the breakaway Luhansk People’s Republic, in Eastern Ukraine. There he had Russian contacts. A fugitive from Italian justice, Palmeri became both a mercenary, fighting for the Russian nationalists, and a propaganda tool, publishing photographs of himself online to his thousand followers on Facebook: the ‘Generalissimo’ doing humanitarian work in an orphanage, and – more often – snaps of himself, topless, hugging a gun or a blonde woman. He was soon joined by other neo-fascist mercenaries (or ‘contractors’) from Italy: ‘Archangel’ (the son of a politician from the Lega Nord) and Spartacus (who in an interview said that every time he shot a Ukrainian, he imagined he was firing at a politician from Brussels).

  Over the next few years, the former capo-ultra became an important bridge between Italian neo-fascists and Russian nationalists. Moscow was deliberately using far-right groups in Europe to undermine the continent’s political consensus and stability. In March 2015 fascist groups from across Europe were invited to Saint Petersburg to the ‘International Russian Conservative Forum’. As well as the British National Party’s former leader, Nick Griffin, and members of Greece’s Golden Dawn, various Italian fascists were present including Roberto Fiore, Forza Nuova’s founder and a close friend of Griffin. ‘We are the avant-garde of a new Europe that will very soon emerge,’ he said. ‘It will be a Christian Europe, a patriotic Europe, and Russia will not just be a part but a leading force.’

  The link between Italian neo-fascists and Russian nationalists was based upon disdain for the alleged ‘effeminacy’ or ‘decadence’ of Western politics. They both disliked its advocacy of gay or women’s rights and its embrace of multiculturalism. Wooed by Moscow’s white machismo, many Italian fascists now looked to Russia as a bulwark against what they saw as the disintegration of Western values. They avidly read works by the prolific fascist writer (and former adviser to various figures in Putin’s regime) Aleksandr Dugin. He promoted ‘Eurasianism’ – a new continent centred on Moscow – and enticed Europeans from the far-right into a fringe organization called the European Communitarianist Party. Eastern-looking Italian fascists also had ties to a neo-Nazi organization called Rusich, inspired by Pan-Slavism and by a longing to recreate a twenty-first-century nationalistic version of the USSR.

  That a capo-ultra could become a militant in these geopolitical games shows how far the ultras had changed in half a century. Few, it’s true, became mercenaries like the self-styled ‘Generalissimo’, but his propaganda from the front-line was inspirational to fascistic ultras back in Italy. Here was a leader of the terraces who, hounded by ‘Communist justice’, had fled abroad to fight against the decadence of Europe. He had turned his guns, quite literally, on the West.

  In reality, he seemed to be fighting imaginary demons. Like his colleague ‘Spartacus’ pretending he was firing at EU politicians, Andrea Palmeri conflated Ukrainian soldiers with anti-Nazi freedom-fighters from the Second World War. ‘I swear, it’s tiring catching them. Fuck, they really move like partisans,’ he said to a friend on the phone. In August 2018 a European arrest warrant was issued for Palmeri. Because he remained in Russian-partitioned Eastern Ukraine, it had no effect other than cementing his reputation amongst his ultra admirers as a courageous combatant against liberal democracy.

  By then, combativeness was what a lot of Italians were longing for. The country was facing an unprecedented crisis of confidence. In 2015 youth unemployment was over 40 per cent. There was an exodus of young Italians abroad, seeking a more meritocratic society outside the country’s borders. In the same year Italy’s national statistics office suggested that almost five million Italians were living in ‘absolute poverty’. The degradation in certain suburbs suggested that the Italian state was, in places, almost entirely absent.

  Peoples’ insecurities were fuelled by a media that gave almost unlimited airtime to ambitious politicians who spoke about a crime epidemic caused by illegal immigration. National security, the narrative went, was threatened not by corruption or organized crime but by refugees. The argument went that a coalition of peaceniks and ‘immigrationists’ had deliberately concocted multiculturalism and had sacrificed sovereignty and indigenous (white) populations in the process.

  The man who, slightly surreally, was held responsible for this conspiracy was the Austro-Japanese philosopher Richard Nikolaus di Coudenhove-Kalergi. After the horrors of the First World War, he had been inspired by the notion of post-nationalism, publishing Pan-Europa in 1923. Long-admired as an eloquent voice for international cooperation, Kalergi became the bête-noir of fascists when the Austrian neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denier, Gerd Honsik, ascribed to him ‘the Kalergi conspiracy’ to eradicate native Europeans from their homeland. In an era of mass migration, economic stagnation and profound discontent about the distance between the people and the perceived ‘elites’ of international politics, Honsik’s theory was like water to parched ground. It was absorbed and diffused, and those who felt quenched by it wanted more. The idea that migrants were deliberately being foisted on impoverished and ignored Italians by a European elite was captivatingly simple, and chimed perfectly with many peoples’ sen
se of vulnerability.

  At the same time the fringe French writer Alain de Benoist and his Nouvelle Droite philosophy (broadly rejecting multiculturalism and globalization) were becoming voguish in far-right circles. De Benoist was even interviewed by American Renaissance magazine and invited to speak at the National Policy Institute. Another French writer, Renaud Camus, published a book called The Great Replacement, in which he spoke of the idea that native Europeans would soon be completely sidelined and displaced by waves of immigrants. This was the beginning of an ‘Identitarian’ movement, in which everything you thought you knew was inverted. Universalism was just Western imperialism, which in turn caused globalization and homogenization. True pluralism – ‘ethnopluralism’ – meant racial separation.

  These ideas influenced both Steve Bannon at Breitbart and the American Alt-right leader Richard Spencer and chimed well with Italian politicians and extra-parliamentarians on the right. CasaPound’s ‘cultural attaché’, Adriano Scianca, published a book called The Sacred Identity. ‘The cancellation of a people from the face of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘… is factually the number one [aim] in the diary of all the global oligarchs.’ It sounded absurd but the paranoid notion got traction and very quickly racial distinctivism became CasaPound policy. Throughout 2014 and 2015 CasaPound rallied protests against ‘asylum centres’. Every time a vacant building was converted into an asylum centre for refugees, in Infernetto and Casale San Nicola and Tor Sapienza, CasaPounders would make friends amongst the locals, distributing food parcels, fixing their plumbing, removing rubbish, and offering strategies and strong arms. Immigration was, according to CasaPound, a question not of racism but of legality and economy.