Our meeting was arranged by a third party and I will never know his real
name. Antonio Salas, as he called himself, certainly did not look like a
skinhead member of Real Madrid's "official" group of violent neo-Nazi
supporters, the feared Ultrasur. But then Antonio, an investigative
reporter, had recently changed his disguise so the group's members could
not track him down and fulfil their pledge to kill him.
We met in a
central Madrid cafe, Antonio fiddling nervously with a cigarette and
sitting with his back to the wall. Antonio spent last year infiltrating
the most radical section of the Ultrasur. He came out to accuse the
self-proclaimed "world's greatest club", nine times champion of Europe,
of harbouring and, in effect, promoting neo-Nazi, racist violence.
Antonio claims to have revealed just how close - despite club denials -
are the ties binding the thugs and officials in a club whose latest
purchases include stars like Ronaldo, Zidane and Figo and which boasts
lucrative sponsorship deals with Adidas and Siemens.
Enter
through gate 42 at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium, turn right down the
first corridor and you will find a grey metal door. That door is the
gateway to what Antonio calls Ultrasur's "private office". It is where
the group keeps its pamphlets, drums, megaphones and flags bearing
General Franco's shield or other neo-Nazi symbols.
Antonio had
made his first contact with the Ultrasur at El Refugio, a bar beside the
stadium where the hard core gather after matches to organise
"cacerias", or hunts, of blacks, prostitutes, tramps, gays and
supporters of other clubs. There he was greeted by chants of "six
million jews to the gas chambers."
Ultrasur leaders, handed free
passes by the club, have long police records. The organisation's number
two, a middle-class lawyer called Alvaro Cadenas, was last week jailed
for four years for stabbing a policeman. The leader, Jose Luis Ochaita,
was banned from entering football grounds for three years in 1998 after
allegedly waving a knife at a player from a rival club.
The
night before Antonio and I met, I had stood outside El Refugio, amid the
broken glass from what the skins call "a shower of stars", otherwise
known as pelting the police with beer bottles. Half a dozen people had
been hurt. But all that had happened before the game. Real Madrid had
won, beating Milan 3-1, and the thugs were in good humour.
Thanks
partly to Antonio and the book he has written about them, the Ultrasur
have added journalists to their list of enemies. I did not stick around
to see if they were planning cacerias. Offered an opportunity to rebut
Antonio's allegations yesterday, the club declined. The public
prosecutor has now opened his own investigation.
Antonio warned
me not to think Real Madrid was the only club protecting the violent.
"Every club in Spain does the same," he said.
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