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He liked that people were scared of him.

My year unpicking fantasy and reality

with a veteran of Italy's football ultras by Tobias Jones, read by Bert Simo.

I had heard the name Alessandro Casolari on and off for years. From 2016 onwards, when I was

researching my book on Italy's ultras, a cross between English football

hooligans and Hell's Angels, the nickname Cazzo kept coming up. In the late 80s and early 90s,

he had led the ultras in Ferrara, whose football club is known as Spaule.

A red-brick city in northern Italy, between Bologna and Venice, Ferrara has always felt sidelined,

languishing in a marshy land of fog and floods. I used to go there quite often, drawn by its festivals and famous writers and film directors. A few years ago,

when I started writing another book about the Po River, I hung out there again, but I never

bumped into Cazo. Then, in December 2024, he called me out of the blue, having got my number from a mutual friend.

He was talking non-stop, weaving together stories about Caracas, Medellin, cocaine, and Kosovo.

He was jumping from one story to the next, and they were all connected by a dozen subplots he had to explain at length.

Every other sentence ended,

I capito. You get it?

I picked up that there had been a murder in 1998,

which was how he had ended up at a funeral next to a man who had just won the lottery.

...