It’s not clear how Antonio Bellocco ended up being stabbed in the neck and heart. Killed last September, “Totò ‘u Nanu” (Short Tony) had been sitting in a car outside a boxing joint with Andrea Beretta, a fellow Inter ultra. The Testudo gym was on a small industrial estate in Cernusco sul Naviglio, a drab suburb northeast of Milan. Early reports into the murder suggested that Beretta had acted in self-defence, after Bellocco shot him in the leg.
Short Tony’s death was just the latest in a long line of ultra murders. An “ultra” is an extremist football fan, sort of a cross between a hooligan and a Hell’s Angel. Any murder in that netherworld is newsworthy, but this one more than ever: as his dialect nickname implies, Bellocco was a Calabrian mobster, sent north to offer muscle to Inter’s Curva Nord ultras: in return for a slice of the gang’s lucrative businesses.
Bellocco had been one of the key mercenaries in an ongoing battle with a rival Inter crew, the Irriducibili. When that battle was won, Bellocco had become one of the top bosses of Inter’s terraces. Many of us had thought the ultras had already touched rock bottom in August 2019, when Lazio’s top boss, a drug-slinging stoner called Fabrizio Piscitelli, was shot dead as he sat on a park bench in Rome. But what’s happening in Milan takes the ultra story to a darker place: they are now essentially narco-crews, ready to greenlight mergers with organised crime to dominate Milan’s suburbs.
All this is particularly poignant because Milan is the city that claims to be the cradle of ultra ideology. AC Milan’s famous Fossa dei Leoni (“Lions’ Den”) and Commandos Tigre (“Tiger Commandoes”) both claim to have been founded around 1968, before any other ultra group in Italy. Back then, the ultras were not considered criminals so much as teenage scallywags. The real Milanese outlaws came from the Ligéra. Meaning “The Light” in the local dialect, it encompassed an assortment of petty crooks: pickpockets, pimps, bookies and fences that graduated onto kidnappings and bank jobs.
These days, though, the city is bossed by the ultras. Milan and Inter share the San Siro stadium, its helix staircases looking like springs whatever the angle. The teams’ respective ultras take it in turns to skim off the top of the tens of thousands of punters who come to the stadium every week.
It all started when the ultras turned their collective back on a sacred tenet of ultradom. Until the early Eighties, it had been a foundational principle that being an ultra meant fighting your enemies — above all enemies from the same city. But when, in 1981, an Inter fan was stabbed to death by a Milan fan, the Milan and Inter ultras negotiated a non-aggression pact.
The major ultra groups from both sides — Nord Kaos and Viking for Inter, the Brigate Rossonero and Commandos Tigre for Milan — began using their sheer force of numbers to make money. Organised hierarchically, these crews started taking over the curtilage of the San Siro, selling fake merch, hiring out parking spaces, levering beers and bapping burgers. A few of them also began offering à la carte highs: coke, speed, weed or E.
Though the Milanese ultras didn’t fight each other, they did fight almost everyone else. Nazzareno Filippini was an Ascoli fan killed by Inter ultras in 1988. Vincenzo Spagnolo, a Genoa supporter, was stabbed to death by a hot-headed Milan fan in January 1995. After those killings, there were more peace conferences.
Some talked of returning to the old days when, they claimed, being an ultra was just a way for waifs to get off their faces and stage-manage the Sunday afternoon spectacle of confetti and pranks. I interviewed hundreds of “purist” ultras for my book on the subject, and most of them lovingly recalled tipped-over cars with number plates from rival cities.
They would speak late into the night about their most memorable striscioni — the long, often witty, banners they unfurled on the terraces. “It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terrace now,” one retired head ultras told me back in 2018. “It makes me suffer greatly… we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to… ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”
This is partly a symptom of politics. In the Sixties, the ultra movement had used names echoing far-Left liberation movements across the globe (“Fedayeen”), or else evoked Italian partisan bands from the Second World War.
During the Eighties and Nineties, however, many crews turned to the far-Right. The full name, for instance, of Inter’s “Boys” gang was “Boys-SAN”, a reference to Mussolini’s paramilitary Squadre d’Azione.
Giorgio Triani is a sports sociologist who wrote two great books about Italian fans in the Nineties, just as the ultra movement was becoming a crucible for the far-Right. “The Left became disinterested in the terraces,” he says, “and very quickly they became perfectly aligned with the far-Right. They had a need to dominate the vulnerable, the opposition, the losers, the blacks…”
Soon enough, it became commonplace for thousands of supporters to grunt at black players, to interrupt silences for drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, to taunt enemies with allegations they were Jewish and would share the fate of Anne Frank. Lazio, Inter and Verona ultras were at the forefront of this political radicalisation, often doing straight-arm salutes and waving swastikas. It even infected the players, with Paolo di Canio unable to resist raising a fascist salute to the Lazio faithful in 2005.
All the while, each passing year made the violence of yesterday seem quaint by comparison. It was money that fed the bloodshed: a police wiretap heard Vittorio Boiocchi — an Inter ultra murdered in 2022 — boast that he made €80,000 a month.
Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters. And so, long before Bellocco arrived in Milan, there were attempted mergers between Calabrian families and northern ultras. About a decade ago, Juventus’s main crew, the Drughi, allowed a Calabrian family to become part of its racket. Ciccio Bucci, one of these Drughi, was also a fan-liaison officer, and was suspected of having snitched on the group. He was promptly beaten up and ostracised. When he returned to Turin, after a year away in Puglia, he jumped from a famous viaduct outside the city.
“Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters.”
It’s not entirely clear who approved Bellocco’s entry to the terraces. But he was fortunate that his ascension occurred just as Inter was bossing Italian football, with the team winning seven trophies so far this decade. The deeper a team goes in a tournament, the more tickets get sold, not just for the stadium but for the planes and buses. Ultras bulk-buy accommodation and food, becoming informal travel agents.
When Inter and Milan met in the semi-final of the 2023 Champions’ League, they agreed to share ticket revenues from the final whoever won. Inter went through, but Milan ultras still made money. Rather than going all in — as ultra philosophy insists you always should — they had essentially “shorted” their own team.
It’s anyway unsurprising that the ultras now cover Milan like a spider’s web: if you want to trade, borrow or buy on the streets of the city, the chances are you’ll cross paths with an ultra. Luca Lucci, an AC Milan hooligan who has done time for drugs-trafficking and GBH, has provided “event-management” services — everything from body-guarding to ticket sales — to rappers like Fedez and Emis Killa. Lucci has also opened a chain of tattoo parlours called Italian Ink. It’s a world no more controlled by teenage tearaways but by old men with names like “Il Barone” (The Baron). When he was shot dead, Boiocchi was 69.
There are advantages to both sides of the mafia-ultra merger. When an ultra finds himself needing to overcome rival groups on the terrace, it’s tempting to call in those pros. And for the mercenaries, there’s the lure of a cash turnover in the low millions for which the punishments are negligible. Ticket-touting, for instance, is only given a custodial sentence if accompanied by more serious crimes.
But Andrea Beretta had apparently grown resentful of his thrusting Calabrian colleague, always in his space and living just around the corner. Bellocco had sought to assert his dominance over Beretta, showing him what he called his family album. “My mother has done 25 years in prison,” he was heard on a wire-tap. “She’s still in prison and she’s 74!”
It’s a story that isn’t over yet. Bellocco was a made man, and his murder will not be without consequences for his alleged killer. Beretta will either enter witness protection and turn on his mates, or else risk a revenge killing. “It was unthinkable 30 years ago that it would have reached these levels,” says Triani. “Back then the terraces were unhealthy, sure, but now [the ultra world] has become a parasitic cancer completely decontextualised from football and sport.” No wonder it’s a movement now more studied by criminologists than sociologists.
Nineteen ultras from both sides were arrested in the aftermath of Bellocco’s killing last autumn. Most are charged with assault, extortion and being part of a “criminal association” (essentially a gang). The Inter ultras are also accused of having “abetted” the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia of whom Bellocco was part.
This incremental professionalisation of ultra gangs goes against another shibboleth of the faith: that no individual makes money from the group. Lucci’s revealing defence is that he’s “only ever made money from drug-dealing, never from being an ultra”. He would rather plead guilty to something the state considers a crime than to betraying the gang, namely by dipping his fingers into his own crew’s till.
Not for the first time, in other words, money and power have flipped a counterculture. And now, commanding voters and consumers by the thousands, they’ve even entered mainstream politics. Again, there’s an overlap of interests: politicians gain street-cred from association with organised fan groups, and organised groups can shift electoral results.
Lucci, now arrested, has enjoyed deliberately public handshakes and hugs with Matteo Salvini, the former interior minister (now deputy prime minister), and himself a die-hard Milanista. The former-mayor of Catania, Salvo Pogliese, and Daniele Belotti, a former League parliamentarian, have also played on their terrace-notoriety to rally fans to the ballot box.
It all feels a long way from those early Sixties days. Back then, the first commandment of ultra faith was fidelity to the borgo, about fighting for your hometown, even if it was just a shitty suburb without hope. But the movement is now as globalised as any multinational, and the striscioni feel like an afterthought.
