The Italians (33 page)

Fan radio was originally an invention of Rome’s formidably well-organized, powerful and wealthy fan clubs. In this, however, the capital is by no means unique. Every Serie A team is followed by one or more groups of die-hard fans generically known as
ultras
.
^*
The oldest
ultras
groups date back to at least the 1950s.
Ultras
fans see themselves as different from—and more disciplined than—British-style hooligans and the originators of a style of support that spread from Italy to much of the rest of Europe, featuring the use of drums, flags, banners and above all flares. These days, however, they project a mix that is well known among soccer fans in Britain and elsewhere: a taste for violent behavior and extremist, usually far-right, politics that routinely comes out in the form of naked racism.

What continues to distinguish Italy’s
ultras
from hard-line supporters in other countries, though, is not so much their extremism as the degree of legitimization they get from the managements of the clubs they support. Some
ultras
are even put on the payroll. They often get subsidized travel to attend away games. Their leaders frequently get free tickets. And they can usually get friends into the stadium to watch matches for free. But such perks are nothing compared with what they can make for themselves by using their symbols—and often those of their clubs—for merchandising. BBC journalists who made a documentary about Lazio’s
Irriducibili
found to their astonishment that the
Irriducibili
had their own headquarters and stocked fourteen shops in and around Rome.

Ultras
leaders routinely have access to the players and the implicitly menacing influence they exert can lead to changes of tactics, players and club policy. In 2004, Lazio’s
Irriducibili
and AS Roma’s
Ultras
gave a frightening demonstration of their power at a “derby” between the two sides. In the first half, a rumor went around among the spectators that a young Roma fan had been run over and killed by police outside the stadium. It is widely suspected that the rumor was agreed upon between the
Ultras
and the
Irriducibili
before the match for reasons that have never become clear. At all events, a few minutes after the restart a delegation of
Ultras
somehow got onto the running track that surrounds the field, and Roma’s captain, Totti, went to speak to them. Paddy Agnew, the Rome correspondent of the
Irish Times,
who was commenting on the match for Rai, wrote afterward in his book on the game in Italy
³
that Totti’s words to his coach immediately afterward “came loud and clear over the effects headset.” They were:
“Se giochiamo adesso, questi ci ammazzano”
—“If we play on now, these guys’ll kill us.” With the agreement of Lazio’s captain and despite the protestations of the referee, the game was called off.

“Fan power had won,” wrote Agnew. “Fan violence too then ensued as violent elements in both Roma and Lazio camps engaged in a series of running battles with riot police outside the ground.” Over the next few years, football violence went from bad to worse, with clashes between
Ultras
and the police becoming considerably bloodier than those between rival groups of fans. In 2007, a police officer died as a result of injuries sustained in a riot during a match in Sicily, and a fan was shot dead by a policeman during a clash between supporters of rival teams at a motorway service station. With the public clamoring for a response, the government introduced a program of restrictions and reforms that has curbed, but not yet eliminated, violence from the game.

If the
Ultras’
adversary is the
sbirro
(cop), then the enemy of all fans is the referee. In Italy, he is not just shortsighted, but an object of almost universal contempt.
^*
Gianni Brera, a journalist whose opinions were read by millions, could write that “in almost every case, we are dealing with either a frustrated person with a need to show to himself that he exists and has free will, or a bully.” Ennio Flaiano, a fellow journalist and writer of fiction—he cowrote with Fellini the screenplays for
La dolce vita
and
8
¹
/
₂
—thought Italians hated the referee for a much simpler reason: “Because he gives a verdict.”

Over the years, a view formed that these detested creatures were susceptible to influence: that consciously—or more probably unconsciously—they favored the big clubs. A term was even coined for the condition from which they were suffering: “psychological slavery.” Nowhere, it was argued, was this more obvious than in their handling of matches involving Juventus, the team that more than any other exuded power. Rooted in Piedmont, the region that unified Italy, and owned by Fiat, the embodiment of Italian industrial pride, Juventus has a
national
character—and a national following—greater than that of any other club. One of its nicknames indeed is
La Fidanzata d’Italia
(roughly, “Italy’s Sweetheart”). You can go into bars in the wilds of Calabria, at the other end of the peninsula from Turin, and find a black-and-white-striped pennant on the shelf and a notice proudly declaring that the bar is the meeting place for the local branch of the Juventus supporters’ club.

The idea that referees subconsciously felt it was unpatriotic to let Juventus lose might seem far-fetched
.
But fans—and particularly those of clubs like Fiorentina, Cagliari and Verona, who have won the championship only once in a blue moon—could nevertheless point to a number of controversial decisions that had gone Juventus’s way at crucial moments in the history of the league. In 1981, for example, in the seventy-fourth minute of the vital clash with Juventus, the referee disallowed a Roma goal that was later shown to be valid. The result was that the title went to Juventus. The same happened the next year after the referee refused a goal that would have given Fiorentina the championship with only fifteen minutes of the season left. On more than one occasion, moreover, Juventus finished the season with noticeably more penalties awarded in their favor and suspiciously few given against. As the years passed, and suspicions increased, fans of rival teams taunted Juventus’s supporters with chants of “You only know how to rob” and “We’d rather be second than thieves.”

It was only in 2005 that they began to wonder whether Juventus’s singular good luck might be due to something more than just psychological subjugation. It was then that the first reports appeared of an investigation code-named “Offside” being carried out by a prosecutor in Turin. He subsequently concluded that nothing the police had discovered was proof of a crime. But he passed the evidence he had gathered to Italy’s main soccer authority, the Federazione Italiana Giuoco Calcio (FIGC), and a few days after the end of the 2005–2006 season extracts from the transcripts of wiretapped telephone conversations leaked to the press.

It was the beginning of a scandal like no other in the history of football in Italy, or anywhere else for that matter. From time to time, players or referees are caught fixing matches. It happens in all countries. Usually there is a link to some kind of betting ring. But
Calciopoli,
^*
as this scandal came to be known, was different. What the transcripts suggested was that Juventus’s top managers had created a web of influence that did indeed enable them to secure compliant referees for their games. Some other clubs were in on the system too, and could benefit from similar favors. The implication was not, as in other scandals, that this or that game was fixed, but that Serie A was fixed; that it was not a tournament between sides that began the season with a theoretically equal chance of winning, but a puppet show: a colorful, dramatic performance that lasted from one year into the next for which the script was written by a handful of powerful and conspiratorial men. And that did not just apply to what could be seen in the stadiums. Some of the transcripts indicated that Juventus’s general manager, Luciano Moggi, was in contact with Aldo Biscardi,
^*
the presenter of what was by then
Il processo di Biscardi
. The idea was to ensure that the slow-motion reconstructions on his program were interpreted in the way that suited Juventus. It was the quintessential demonstration of how, in Italy, what is visible is not necessarily real. Biscardi took his program off national television after it was caught up in the scandal, and he, his
Supermoviola
and his
vallette
were last seen—more than thirty years after the first edition of the program—on a circuit of minor local stations.

There were two bizarre things about
Calciopoli.
One was that, while the scandal was at its height, Italy won its fourth World Cup. The other was that no money was ever shown to have changed hands.
^*
The system worked because the managers concerned had created a belief that they were so powerful and influential that they could make or break the careers of anyone else in the game. And the very belief that their word was law gave them the power and influence they needed to secure their aims. It was a perfect example of a mafia in the loosest sense of the word—of the sort of inclusive (yet exclusive), anticompetitive and perhaps family-like arrangements that abound in Italy.

CHAPTER 15

Restrictive Practices

Per lungo tempo si sono confuse la mafia e la mentalità mafiosa, la mafia come organizzazione illegale e la mafia come semplice modo di essere. Quale errore! Si può benissimo avere una mentalità mafiosa senza essere un criminale.

Mafia and mafia-like mentality, the mafia as an illegal organization and the mafia as simply an outlook on life have long been confused. What a mistake! You can perfectly well have a mafia-like mentality without being a criminal.

Giovanni Falcone

C
laudia had been left with several houses when her husband died. She rented them out to vacationers wanting to spend time in the Italian countryside. We had agreed to meet her at the house of a mutual friend. Claudia had to pick up some guests—nonpaying guests who were old friends, as it happens—from the railway station. She said she would catch up with us once she’d dropped them off at her home. As she was coming out of the station, she was approached by a group of local taxi drivers.

“They said that, by collecting my guests from the station, I was taking business off them,” she said. Claudia was clearly shaken by their intimidating manner and concerned by what might happen if she ignored their protest. This did not happen in Sicily, nor even in Puglia. The station in question is in Tuscany.

I have a friend who lives on one of the Italian islands. She needed a table. She had seen just what she wanted in another part of the island. But there was a furniture shop in her immediate vicinity, and it was owned by someone she had known since she was a child but who was not in any sense a friend. To buy the table anywhere else, however, would be seen not as the legitimate choice of a consumer, but as a gross betrayal. She and her partner were
his
customers. He would probably never speak to them again if they went elsewhere. So they ended up buying the table at the shop on the other side of the island and then carrying it between them all the way back to their home on a circuitous route so that neither the table nor a delivery van of the rival shop would be seen by the man who regarded himself as
their
furniture supplier.

Anyone who has lived in Italy will no doubt be able to recount similar anecdotes. If you go regularly to a shop, bar or restaurant, you risk arousing possessive instincts (and particularly if you have accepted—and there is really no way you can refuse—an unsolicited
sconto,
or discount). This has been a special problem for me because of the nature of my work. I travel frequently and on my return I have often been greeted in regular haunts with an ever so slightly sardonic
“Ben tornato”
(“Welcome back”). If I explain apologetically that I had to go abroad, then everything will be fine. But if I limit myself to the customary—pretty much untranslatable—response of
“Ben trovato,”
there is a danger that my coffee will be served with just a tad less care and that the bar owner will remove himself to the other end of the counter to chat with exaggerated warmth to someone he clearly regards as a
genuine
regular.