Serie A 2024-25 (41 Viewers)
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Napoli have: Torino (H), Lecce (A), Genoa (H), Parma (A), Cagliari (H)
The home matches are against teams that don't need the points at all. In the 37th round Parma are likely to be safe already, so they might not need the points either. That leaves the away match in Lecce as their toughest.
A piss easy schedule, indeed.
But even if they win everything, Inter will have to lose points on two matches. Tomorrow's away match to Bologna is vital, imo. If they win, then they probably won't lose points in two out of: Roma (H), Verona (H), Torino (A), Lazio (H), Como (A).
Then again, Inter will have two matches vs Barca, a Coppa match vs Milan, and two potential matches: CL final and Coppa final vs Bologna.
What is clear, imo, is that Napoli must win all the remaining matches, and Bologna will simply have to avoid a defeat tomorrow.
I know that Bologna is our rival for top 4, but I still want them to get a draw vs Inter. Hell, I won't complain even if they beat Inter
The home matches are against teams that don't need the points at all. In the 37th round Parma are likely to be safe already, so they might not need the points either. That leaves the away match in Lecce as their toughest.
A piss easy schedule, indeed.
But even if they win everything, Inter will have to lose points on two matches. Tomorrow's away match to Bologna is vital, imo. If they win, then they probably won't lose points in two out of: Roma (H), Verona (H), Torino (A), Lazio (H), Como (A).
Then again, Inter will have two matches vs Barca, a Coppa match vs Milan, and two potential matches: CL final and Coppa final vs Bologna.
What is clear, imo, is that Napoli must win all the remaining matches, and Bologna will simply have to avoid a defeat tomorrow.
I know that Bologna is our rival for top 4, but I still want them to get a draw vs Inter. Hell, I won't complain even if they beat Inter
Napoli have: Torino (H), Lecce (A), Genoa (H), Parma (A), Cagliari (H)
The home matches are against teams that don't need the points at all. In the 37th round Parma are likely to be safe already, so they might not need the points either. That leaves the away match in Lecce as their toughest.
A piss easy schedule, indeed.
But even if they win everything, Inter will have to lose points on two matches. Tomorrow's away match to Bologna is vital, imo. If they win, then they probably won't lose points in two out of: Roma (H), Verona (H), Torino (A), Lazio (H), Como (A).
Then again, Inter will have two matches vs Barca, a Coppa match vs Milan, and two potential matches: CL final and Coppa final vs Bologna.
What is clear, imo, is that Napoli must win all the remaining matches, and Bologna will simply have to avoid a defeat tomorrow.
I know that Bologna is our rival for top 4, but I still want them to get a draw vs Inter. Hell, I won't complain even if they beat Inter
The home matches are against teams that don't need the points at all. In the 37th round Parma are likely to be safe already, so they might not need the points either. That leaves the away match in Lecce as their toughest.
A piss easy schedule, indeed.
But even if they win everything, Inter will have to lose points on two matches. Tomorrow's away match to Bologna is vital, imo. If they win, then they probably won't lose points in two out of: Roma (H), Verona (H), Torino (A), Lazio (H), Como (A).
Then again, Inter will have two matches vs Barca, a Coppa match vs Milan, and two potential matches: CL final and Coppa final vs Bologna.
What is clear, imo, is that Napoli must win all the remaining matches, and Bologna will simply have to avoid a defeat tomorrow.
I know that Bologna is our rival for top 4, but I still want them to get a draw vs Inter. Hell, I won't complain even if they beat Inter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/17/inter-ac-milan-ultra-fans-mafia/
They are the die-hard fans of Milan’s soccer teams — and mafia-linked
After two leaders of Inter Milan’s ultra group were killed, investigators concluded that the fan clubs of the Milan teams were run by the Italian mafia.
By Kevin Sieff
and
Francesco Porzio
MILAN — The two men climbed into a white hatchback. They had just finished working out at a gym on the outskirts of the city, making the most of a day without a game.
Antonio Bellocco, the short 36-year-old in the driver’s seat, and Andrea Beretta, the imposing 49-year-old in the passenger seat, were the leaders of the Curva Nord, a group of hardcore supporters of the legendary Inter Milan soccer club.
Fan groups in Italy known as “ultras” are at once a political identity, a business and the loudest section in a stadium. Their leaders have become important power brokers, capitalizing on the near-religiosity surrounding Italy’s most famous teams. Some ultras have forged connections to the political elite; others have become powerful drug traffickers.
As ultra leaders in Milan, Bellocco and Beretta had become influential figures in Italy’s richest city, thriving at the nexus of licit and illicit wealth, investigators say. Fans would ask Beretta to pose for photos before games as if he were a star forward. The diminutive Bellocco became widely known by his nickname, “Totò the Dwarf.”
What few people knew was that the two men were working for the Italian mafia, Italian investigators said, turning everything from ticket sales to beer concessions into a revenue stream for organized crime.
An undated photo of Antonio Bellocco. (State Police in Milan)
It was a cloudy afternoon early last September when the white car pulled away slowly from the gym. Suddenly, it lurched forward, video of the incident shows, as Bellocco apparently lost control, then opened his door and fell to the ground. He’d been stabbed 21 times by Beretta, his partner, who in turn had been shot in the leg by Bellocco, investigators said.
Bellocco died shortly afterward. He was the second leader of Inter Milan’s fan group to be killed in two years.
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Bellocco’s death and Beretta’s arrest would accelerate a police investigation that was already underway. The case would illustrate in remarkable detail how criminals had co-opted the fan club of one of the world’s most famous teams. The investigation would establish that the ultra leadership for Inter Milan’s storied rival and the city’s other major team, AC Milan, was also working for the mafia.
An undated photo of Andrea Beretta. (State Police in Milan)
As Italian soccer boomed into a multibillion-dollar business, it drew a new range of financial interests, from Persian Gulf states to American financiers. It turned out organized crime wasn’t far behind. Seeing a sport awash in cash, the mafia came looking for a piece of the action — scalping tickets, running concessions and stadium parking, and selling team merchandise. The ultras, with their long-established influence and connections at the clubs, as well as their reputation for violence, were the mafia’s conduit, investigators said.
Even though criminal groups have not infiltrated locker rooms or compromised results, investigators say, they have developed lines of communication with players, head coaches and other team officials — a startling collision of the two worlds.
Both Bellocco and Beretta were being wiretapped at the time of the killing. Transcripts of their phone calls are among thousands of pages of police and court documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents, along with hours of interviews, show the way organized crime has infiltrated some of the highest levels of Italian soccer fandom.
Inter Milan and AC Milan, both of which have American owners, declined to comment. Beretta’s attorney also declined to comment.
Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor. (Ivan Romano/Getty Images)
“It forces us to open our eyes to the reality — to the risks of mafia influence in the stadiums,” Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor, said after arrests were made in September: 19 members of the ultras charged with the crime of mafia association.
The trial, which began in March, has transfixed the country. “The onetime moral capital of Italy has discovered it has a boil as big as its skyscrapers,” said a headline in La Repubblica.
Prosecutors have forced both clubs to accept government-appointed advisers to stop the creep of organized crime into soccer. But Italian law enforcement officials worry that won’t be enough. The officials have threatened to name a public commissar to take over both clubs if they don’t extricate mafia elements from their fan base.
As if underscoring the challenge, the Inter Milan ultras agreed on a new slogan in the wake of the scandal:
“Since 1969. Proud, united, never tamed.”
Mafia infiltration
Ultras cheer after a goal in the Feb. 2 match between Inter Milan and AC Milan at the San Siro. Ultras sometimes light flares. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For more than a century, Inter Milan has been one of the world’s most popular sports teams. It won national and European championships. Its 75,000-seat stadium is almost always full; its global fan base is estimated at 55 million.
The team is famous, too, for the character of its most loyal supporters: Its ultra group is a fan base within a fan base. The Curva Nord (North Stand) is known for its ability to transform a home game, roaring in support for Inter, demoralizing opponents with thunderous hostility. Ultras have rained flares upon the field; they chant using megaphones; they can turn violent.
As European soccer boomed, the ultras also became a machine to generate profit and power. The mafia had insinuated itself into other top teams. In 2018, Italian investigators found that mobsters had infiltrated the ultra group of Turin-based Juventus, another of Europe’s most famous teams, seizing large amounts of ticketing revenue.
An undated photo of Vittorio Boiocchi. (State Police in Milan)
In Milan, the takeover began in 2019. That’s when the Inter ultras chose Vittorio Boiocchi, known as “the Uncle,” to be the group’s leader. Boiocchi was in his late 60s and had spent 26 years in prison for drug trafficking, kidnapping and theft.
After his release, drawing on connections to the ultras he had made as a young man, Boiocchi launched a network of scalpers who hawked wholesale tickets for a large markup. By 2020, he was making a million dollars a year from ticket sales and other stadium revenue, according to investigators. In his car he carried a pistol, handcuffs and bulletproof vests stolen from Italian law enforcement. He was accused of shaking down Milanese businessmen; other criminal groups had been talking on wiretapped lines about taking him out, investigators said.
On Oct. 29, 2022, two men on a motorcycle drove past Boiocchi’s home in northern Milan as he was arriving. One of the men fired five shots from a 9mm gun. Boiocchi died minutes after arriving at a hospital.
Police investigate near the site of Boiocchi's killing in Milan on Oct. 29, 2022. (Claudio Furlan/LaPresse/AP)
The killing left the ultras leaderless — an inflection point in the history of the group. Some fans said Boiocchi’s demise was an opportunity to cut ties with the mafia. But several of the group’s top lieutenants, including Andrea Beretta and another man named Marco Ferdico, argued that it was time to double down, investigators said.
Ferdico had an idea of how to do it. His wife was from Italy’s southern Calabria region. Through her, he knew members of the Bellocco family, key members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s largest organized crime group. There was one Bellocco who seemed a good fit because of his standing within the mafia: Antonio was the son of Giulio and Aurora Bellocco, who were both in prison for mafia association. His uncle Umberto had been a longtime ’Ndrangheta boss.
The police were listening to wiretaps as the ultras appeared to settle on Bellocco.
“When we heard the name ‘Bellocco,’ we knew — ‘Okay, this is going to get serious,’” said one police officer who worked on the investigation. The officer, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The fans of one of Italy’s most successful teams were about to import one of its most infamous crime families.
Targeting Milan’s iconic soccer stadium
Fans depart the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. The final score was 1-1. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The ’Ndrangheta was founded in the 1860s in Calabria, where it began blackmailing farmers and stealing cattle. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the group went global. It is now “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” according to Interpol. It operates enterprises from Colombian drug-trafficking rings to Canadian banks. Its members have been arrested in Brooklyn and Guyana and Ivory Coast.
Corrupting the fan base of an Italian soccer club would be a major coup for the ’Ndrangheta and the Belloccos, one of the organization’s most prominent subgroups or “clans,” according to anti-mafia prosecutors. When the ’Ndrangheta took over the Juventus ultras in 2017, they applied the same extortion tactics used in other sectors. At one point, they threatened to have the ultras sing racist chants during games, which could result in a fine for the team, if management didn’t hand over more tickets, investigators said.
Police would later arrest 12 ultra leaders on charges of blackmail. The president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli, was suspended for “unauthorized relations with ultra fans.”
Juventus President Andrea Agnelli at an April 2021 match with Parma in the Juventus stadium in Turin. (Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
But it was Italy’s financial capital, home to two of its most prestigious soccer teams, where the ’Ndrangheta’s most significant incursion into soccer would occur.
Milan had long been an ’Ndrangheta power base, one of the first places the group had expanded beyond its southern Italian roots. With Boiocchi dead, the group had an opportunity to consolidate its influence at the city’s iconic soccer stadium — the San Siro, where both Inter and AC Milan play.
Antonio Bellocco arrived in Milan in 2022. At around that time, in the wake of Boiocchi’s killing, the police had wiretapped many of the team’s ultra members.
What they heard was Bellocco bulldozing his way into the Inter community, using his ties to the ’Ndrangheta to establish his standing. He was unconcerned about Inter’s performance; he wanted to use the club to accrue money and power.
“I don’t give a damn about the team,” he said on one wiretapped call. “I don’t do things for the banners. I do it for economic interests.”
After Bellocco’s arrival, he, Beretta and Ferdico expanded the business that Boiocchi had launched. Every aspect of fan culture would be monetized, they decided, according to the wiretaps, with a portion of the earnings returning to the ’Ndrangheta through Bellocco.
Fans shop at a stand outside the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The men sourced tickets for away games directly from the team management at wholesale prices and sold them for many multiples of their face value. In the 2023 Champions League final against Manchester City in Istanbul — the biggest game in European soccer — Beretta estimated that they made $270,000 in profits by selling tickets for roughly $1,000 each to desperate fans.
To get those tickets, Ferdico called Inter coach Simone Inzaghi and made an unsubtle threat, alluding to the ability of the ultras to cause problems for the club.
“I’ll be brief, sir,” Ferdico said on a wiretapped call. “We have 1,000 tickets, but we need 200 more to be calm.”
Inzaghi said on the call that he worried Ferdico would instruct fans not to cheer unless he got what he wanted. Inzaghi sent the request to the club’s administration.
An undated photo of Marco Ferdico. (State Police in Milan)
Ferdico got the additional tickets, investigators said.
Inzaghi, through a team spokesman, declined to comment. Ferdico could not be reached for comment.
The question of the team’s relationship to the ’Ndrangheta would become a focus of the police investigation: To what degree were coaches and players complicit?
Prosecutors would later interrogate several officials from both Inter and AC Milan and determine that the teams were “damaged parties” in the case, not suspects. But other Italian officials publicly questioned why the club hierarchies had not alerted authorities to mafia influence.
“Soccer is a business activity, and criminal organizations are interested in all business activities. Unfortunately, we have seen that there are no complaints from the entrepreneurs who are the victims,” Antonio Quintavalle, a general in the finance police, said at a news conference.
Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi watches his team during the Feb. 2 match at the San Siro. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Bellocco and Beretta had found a way to monetize almost everything that happened at the San Siro, which is owned by the municipality of Milan. Some of the ’Ndrangheta revenue streams were small: The men took over the sale of team magazines, which brought in several thousand dollars a game.
“It’s textbook mafia behavior,” said Antonio Nicaso, who has written dozens of books on the ’Ndrangheta. “The idea was: ‘We are a pseudo authority and everything is under our control. We are running territory — in this case the stadium — and receiving a portion of any profits.’”
They controlled licenses for beer vendors at the stadium, which they sold weekly. They controlled the sale of merchandise and food outside the stadium and parking under and near the stadium. Police said they believe the revenue from the San Siro was reinvested in illicit activities around the world.
In some cases, the men were less interested in generating immediate profits than building relationships that could be monetized in the future. For example, Beretta later told prosecutors that one of the reasons they were eager to control the VIP parking lot under the stadium was that “you see football players, you see managers. It’s about relationships.”
A secret alliance
An emptied San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Ahead of the Champions League final in 2023, Ferdico and Bellocco walked into Italian Ink, a tattoo parlor and barbershop in Milan.
They had arrived to see the shop’s owner, Luca Lucci, a bald, tattooed weightlifter nicknamed “the Joker.” Lucci had his hand in businesses across Milan. But most famously, he was the head of the ultras of AC Milan, Inter Milan’s rival.
Fans of the two teams had clashed for decades. Their faceoffs are considered to be among the most heated matches in modern sport. So it was odd that Bellocco and Ferdico would walk into Italian Ink. By then, undercover police were trailing them.
Lucci had his own ties to organized crime. In 2019, according to a pending charge, he trafficked two tons of cocaine using an ’Ndrangheta route from South America to Italy. Now, investigators discovered, he and Bellocco were working together to monetize the warring ultra groups.
An undated photo of Luca Lucci. (State Police in Milan)
“The investigations show that the leaders of the two fan groups had a nonbelligerent relationship to maximize illicit profits,” the chief prosecutor of Milan, Marcello Viola, said in describing the accord to reporters.
Lucci’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
It would later emerge that during the visit to Italian Ink, Bellocco and Lucci were negotiating a 50-50 split of ticket proceeds from the Champions League final in Istanbul regardless of whether Inter or AC Milan, slated to meet in the semifinal, qualified for the championship.
The police, dumbstruck, heard Ferdico explain the merits of the deal to Beretta over the phone: “If we make it to the final, we split it in two. If they make it, we split it in two — either way, you’ve still won.”
Rising tension
Police outside the San Siro before the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Milan police operated out of the third floor of the local police department, in a stately 19th-century building just north of the city center.
By 2024, the officers had been watching Bellocco and Beretta for nearly two years. A Milan public prosecutor, Paolo Storari, was planning a major crackdown on mafia influence in soccer. The case was deemed so sensitive that the prefecture of Milan ordered permanent police protection for Storari, who understood the high stakes of tangling with Milan’s teams.
Both teams had connections to Italian politics (Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time prime minister of Italy, had owned AC Milan). They had wealthy international backers. RedBird Capital, an American private equity company, purchased a controlling stake in AC Milan in 2022 in a deal worth more than $1.2 billion. American asset management company Oaktree Capital Management owns Inter Milan.
On their wiretaps throughout 2024, police officers said, they sensed tension between Bellocco and Beretta. Beretta ran a store selling Inter merchandise called We Are Milano — another element of the business that Bellocco seemed interested in taking over.
“At one point, we could tell that Beretta feared for his life,” one officer said in an interview.
Beretta would later tell police in an interrogation that he believed his former friend would poison his coffee and bury him outside Milan.
When the police got the call that someone had been stabbed in Bellocco’s car outside the gym, most officers assumed Beretta was dead.
“It was a shock to learn that actually it was the other way around,” said the officer.
Bellocco’s body was transported to Calabria. But police in the region’s largest city made an announcement: There would be no public funeral. “A public event would allow for a show of the strength for the criminal family,” Reggio Calabria police said in a statement.
Authorities in Milan knew they needed to accelerate their investigation. At dawn on Sept. 30, they raided 40 homes and businesses, arresting 19 people, including Ferdico and Lucci. Beretta had already been arrested in the hours after Bellocco’s death. He was charged with murder, but claimed he had acted in self-defense. None of the defendants could be reached for comment.
The trial of 16 ultras began in early March. Soon after, Beretta was charged by prosecutors with organizing Boiocchi’s killing; five others were also arrested Friday in the case, including the alleged gunman. Beretta admitted to the crime, according to interrogation transcripts.
“We organized everything,” he told authorities, explaining that his plan was to get Boiocchi out of the way and install new leadership for the ultras.
By the time he made that admission, prosecutors said, Beretta had become a cooperating witness.
The reason for that cooperation was clear to everyone in Milan: If Beretta was sent to prison after killing an ’Ndrangheta leader, he wouldn’t last long.
After two leaders of Inter Milan’s ultra group were killed, investigators concluded that the fan clubs of the Milan teams were run by the Italian mafia.
By Kevin Sieff
and
Francesco Porzio
MILAN — The two men climbed into a white hatchback. They had just finished working out at a gym on the outskirts of the city, making the most of a day without a game.
Antonio Bellocco, the short 36-year-old in the driver’s seat, and Andrea Beretta, the imposing 49-year-old in the passenger seat, were the leaders of the Curva Nord, a group of hardcore supporters of the legendary Inter Milan soccer club.
Fan groups in Italy known as “ultras” are at once a political identity, a business and the loudest section in a stadium. Their leaders have become important power brokers, capitalizing on the near-religiosity surrounding Italy’s most famous teams. Some ultras have forged connections to the political elite; others have become powerful drug traffickers.
As ultra leaders in Milan, Bellocco and Beretta had become influential figures in Italy’s richest city, thriving at the nexus of licit and illicit wealth, investigators say. Fans would ask Beretta to pose for photos before games as if he were a star forward. The diminutive Bellocco became widely known by his nickname, “Totò the Dwarf.”
What few people knew was that the two men were working for the Italian mafia, Italian investigators said, turning everything from ticket sales to beer concessions into a revenue stream for organized crime.
It was a cloudy afternoon early last September when the white car pulled away slowly from the gym. Suddenly, it lurched forward, video of the incident shows, as Bellocco apparently lost control, then opened his door and fell to the ground. He’d been stabbed 21 times by Beretta, his partner, who in turn had been shot in the leg by Bellocco, investigators said.
Bellocco died shortly afterward. He was the second leader of Inter Milan’s fan group to be killed in two years.
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Bellocco’s death and Beretta’s arrest would accelerate a police investigation that was already underway. The case would illustrate in remarkable detail how criminals had co-opted the fan club of one of the world’s most famous teams. The investigation would establish that the ultra leadership for Inter Milan’s storied rival and the city’s other major team, AC Milan, was also working for the mafia.
As Italian soccer boomed into a multibillion-dollar business, it drew a new range of financial interests, from Persian Gulf states to American financiers. It turned out organized crime wasn’t far behind. Seeing a sport awash in cash, the mafia came looking for a piece of the action — scalping tickets, running concessions and stadium parking, and selling team merchandise. The ultras, with their long-established influence and connections at the clubs, as well as their reputation for violence, were the mafia’s conduit, investigators said.
Even though criminal groups have not infiltrated locker rooms or compromised results, investigators say, they have developed lines of communication with players, head coaches and other team officials — a startling collision of the two worlds.
Both Bellocco and Beretta were being wiretapped at the time of the killing. Transcripts of their phone calls are among thousands of pages of police and court documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents, along with hours of interviews, show the way organized crime has infiltrated some of the highest levels of Italian soccer fandom.
Inter Milan and AC Milan, both of which have American owners, declined to comment. Beretta’s attorney also declined to comment.
Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor. (Ivan Romano/Getty Images)
“It forces us to open our eyes to the reality — to the risks of mafia influence in the stadiums,” Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor, said after arrests were made in September: 19 members of the ultras charged with the crime of mafia association.
The trial, which began in March, has transfixed the country. “The onetime moral capital of Italy has discovered it has a boil as big as its skyscrapers,” said a headline in La Repubblica.
Prosecutors have forced both clubs to accept government-appointed advisers to stop the creep of organized crime into soccer. But Italian law enforcement officials worry that won’t be enough. The officials have threatened to name a public commissar to take over both clubs if they don’t extricate mafia elements from their fan base.
As if underscoring the challenge, the Inter Milan ultras agreed on a new slogan in the wake of the scandal:
“Since 1969. Proud, united, never tamed.”
Mafia infiltration
Ultras cheer after a goal in the Feb. 2 match between Inter Milan and AC Milan at the San Siro. Ultras sometimes light flares. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For more than a century, Inter Milan has been one of the world’s most popular sports teams. It won national and European championships. Its 75,000-seat stadium is almost always full; its global fan base is estimated at 55 million.
The team is famous, too, for the character of its most loyal supporters: Its ultra group is a fan base within a fan base. The Curva Nord (North Stand) is known for its ability to transform a home game, roaring in support for Inter, demoralizing opponents with thunderous hostility. Ultras have rained flares upon the field; they chant using megaphones; they can turn violent.
As European soccer boomed, the ultras also became a machine to generate profit and power. The mafia had insinuated itself into other top teams. In 2018, Italian investigators found that mobsters had infiltrated the ultra group of Turin-based Juventus, another of Europe’s most famous teams, seizing large amounts of ticketing revenue.
In Milan, the takeover began in 2019. That’s when the Inter ultras chose Vittorio Boiocchi, known as “the Uncle,” to be the group’s leader. Boiocchi was in his late 60s and had spent 26 years in prison for drug trafficking, kidnapping and theft.
After his release, drawing on connections to the ultras he had made as a young man, Boiocchi launched a network of scalpers who hawked wholesale tickets for a large markup. By 2020, he was making a million dollars a year from ticket sales and other stadium revenue, according to investigators. In his car he carried a pistol, handcuffs and bulletproof vests stolen from Italian law enforcement. He was accused of shaking down Milanese businessmen; other criminal groups had been talking on wiretapped lines about taking him out, investigators said.
On Oct. 29, 2022, two men on a motorcycle drove past Boiocchi’s home in northern Milan as he was arriving. One of the men fired five shots from a 9mm gun. Boiocchi died minutes after arriving at a hospital.
Police investigate near the site of Boiocchi's killing in Milan on Oct. 29, 2022. (Claudio Furlan/LaPresse/AP)
The killing left the ultras leaderless — an inflection point in the history of the group. Some fans said Boiocchi’s demise was an opportunity to cut ties with the mafia. But several of the group’s top lieutenants, including Andrea Beretta and another man named Marco Ferdico, argued that it was time to double down, investigators said.
Ferdico had an idea of how to do it. His wife was from Italy’s southern Calabria region. Through her, he knew members of the Bellocco family, key members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s largest organized crime group. There was one Bellocco who seemed a good fit because of his standing within the mafia: Antonio was the son of Giulio and Aurora Bellocco, who were both in prison for mafia association. His uncle Umberto had been a longtime ’Ndrangheta boss.
The police were listening to wiretaps as the ultras appeared to settle on Bellocco.
“When we heard the name ‘Bellocco,’ we knew — ‘Okay, this is going to get serious,’” said one police officer who worked on the investigation. The officer, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The fans of one of Italy’s most successful teams were about to import one of its most infamous crime families.
Targeting Milan’s iconic soccer stadium
Fans depart the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. The final score was 1-1. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The ’Ndrangheta was founded in the 1860s in Calabria, where it began blackmailing farmers and stealing cattle. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the group went global. It is now “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” according to Interpol. It operates enterprises from Colombian drug-trafficking rings to Canadian banks. Its members have been arrested in Brooklyn and Guyana and Ivory Coast.
Corrupting the fan base of an Italian soccer club would be a major coup for the ’Ndrangheta and the Belloccos, one of the organization’s most prominent subgroups or “clans,” according to anti-mafia prosecutors. When the ’Ndrangheta took over the Juventus ultras in 2017, they applied the same extortion tactics used in other sectors. At one point, they threatened to have the ultras sing racist chants during games, which could result in a fine for the team, if management didn’t hand over more tickets, investigators said.
Police would later arrest 12 ultra leaders on charges of blackmail. The president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli, was suspended for “unauthorized relations with ultra fans.”
Juventus President Andrea Agnelli at an April 2021 match with Parma in the Juventus stadium in Turin. (Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
But it was Italy’s financial capital, home to two of its most prestigious soccer teams, where the ’Ndrangheta’s most significant incursion into soccer would occur.
Milan had long been an ’Ndrangheta power base, one of the first places the group had expanded beyond its southern Italian roots. With Boiocchi dead, the group had an opportunity to consolidate its influence at the city’s iconic soccer stadium — the San Siro, where both Inter and AC Milan play.
Antonio Bellocco arrived in Milan in 2022. At around that time, in the wake of Boiocchi’s killing, the police had wiretapped many of the team’s ultra members.
What they heard was Bellocco bulldozing his way into the Inter community, using his ties to the ’Ndrangheta to establish his standing. He was unconcerned about Inter’s performance; he wanted to use the club to accrue money and power.
“I don’t give a damn about the team,” he said on one wiretapped call. “I don’t do things for the banners. I do it for economic interests.”
After Bellocco’s arrival, he, Beretta and Ferdico expanded the business that Boiocchi had launched. Every aspect of fan culture would be monetized, they decided, according to the wiretaps, with a portion of the earnings returning to the ’Ndrangheta through Bellocco.
Fans shop at a stand outside the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The men sourced tickets for away games directly from the team management at wholesale prices and sold them for many multiples of their face value. In the 2023 Champions League final against Manchester City in Istanbul — the biggest game in European soccer — Beretta estimated that they made $270,000 in profits by selling tickets for roughly $1,000 each to desperate fans.
To get those tickets, Ferdico called Inter coach Simone Inzaghi and made an unsubtle threat, alluding to the ability of the ultras to cause problems for the club.
“I’ll be brief, sir,” Ferdico said on a wiretapped call. “We have 1,000 tickets, but we need 200 more to be calm.”
Inzaghi said on the call that he worried Ferdico would instruct fans not to cheer unless he got what he wanted. Inzaghi sent the request to the club’s administration.
Ferdico got the additional tickets, investigators said.
Inzaghi, through a team spokesman, declined to comment. Ferdico could not be reached for comment.
The question of the team’s relationship to the ’Ndrangheta would become a focus of the police investigation: To what degree were coaches and players complicit?
Prosecutors would later interrogate several officials from both Inter and AC Milan and determine that the teams were “damaged parties” in the case, not suspects. But other Italian officials publicly questioned why the club hierarchies had not alerted authorities to mafia influence.
“Soccer is a business activity, and criminal organizations are interested in all business activities. Unfortunately, we have seen that there are no complaints from the entrepreneurs who are the victims,” Antonio Quintavalle, a general in the finance police, said at a news conference.
Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi watches his team during the Feb. 2 match at the San Siro. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Bellocco and Beretta had found a way to monetize almost everything that happened at the San Siro, which is owned by the municipality of Milan. Some of the ’Ndrangheta revenue streams were small: The men took over the sale of team magazines, which brought in several thousand dollars a game.
“It’s textbook mafia behavior,” said Antonio Nicaso, who has written dozens of books on the ’Ndrangheta. “The idea was: ‘We are a pseudo authority and everything is under our control. We are running territory — in this case the stadium — and receiving a portion of any profits.’”
They controlled licenses for beer vendors at the stadium, which they sold weekly. They controlled the sale of merchandise and food outside the stadium and parking under and near the stadium. Police said they believe the revenue from the San Siro was reinvested in illicit activities around the world.
In some cases, the men were less interested in generating immediate profits than building relationships that could be monetized in the future. For example, Beretta later told prosecutors that one of the reasons they were eager to control the VIP parking lot under the stadium was that “you see football players, you see managers. It’s about relationships.”
A secret alliance
An emptied San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Ahead of the Champions League final in 2023, Ferdico and Bellocco walked into Italian Ink, a tattoo parlor and barbershop in Milan.
They had arrived to see the shop’s owner, Luca Lucci, a bald, tattooed weightlifter nicknamed “the Joker.” Lucci had his hand in businesses across Milan. But most famously, he was the head of the ultras of AC Milan, Inter Milan’s rival.
Fans of the two teams had clashed for decades. Their faceoffs are considered to be among the most heated matches in modern sport. So it was odd that Bellocco and Ferdico would walk into Italian Ink. By then, undercover police were trailing them.
Lucci had his own ties to organized crime. In 2019, according to a pending charge, he trafficked two tons of cocaine using an ’Ndrangheta route from South America to Italy. Now, investigators discovered, he and Bellocco were working together to monetize the warring ultra groups.
“The investigations show that the leaders of the two fan groups had a nonbelligerent relationship to maximize illicit profits,” the chief prosecutor of Milan, Marcello Viola, said in describing the accord to reporters.
Lucci’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
It would later emerge that during the visit to Italian Ink, Bellocco and Lucci were negotiating a 50-50 split of ticket proceeds from the Champions League final in Istanbul regardless of whether Inter or AC Milan, slated to meet in the semifinal, qualified for the championship.
The police, dumbstruck, heard Ferdico explain the merits of the deal to Beretta over the phone: “If we make it to the final, we split it in two. If they make it, we split it in two — either way, you’ve still won.”
Rising tension
Police outside the San Siro before the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Milan police operated out of the third floor of the local police department, in a stately 19th-century building just north of the city center.
By 2024, the officers had been watching Bellocco and Beretta for nearly two years. A Milan public prosecutor, Paolo Storari, was planning a major crackdown on mafia influence in soccer. The case was deemed so sensitive that the prefecture of Milan ordered permanent police protection for Storari, who understood the high stakes of tangling with Milan’s teams.
Both teams had connections to Italian politics (Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time prime minister of Italy, had owned AC Milan). They had wealthy international backers. RedBird Capital, an American private equity company, purchased a controlling stake in AC Milan in 2022 in a deal worth more than $1.2 billion. American asset management company Oaktree Capital Management owns Inter Milan.
On their wiretaps throughout 2024, police officers said, they sensed tension between Bellocco and Beretta. Beretta ran a store selling Inter merchandise called We Are Milano — another element of the business that Bellocco seemed interested in taking over.
“At one point, we could tell that Beretta feared for his life,” one officer said in an interview.
Beretta would later tell police in an interrogation that he believed his former friend would poison his coffee and bury him outside Milan.
When the police got the call that someone had been stabbed in Bellocco’s car outside the gym, most officers assumed Beretta was dead.
“It was a shock to learn that actually it was the other way around,” said the officer.
Bellocco’s body was transported to Calabria. But police in the region’s largest city made an announcement: There would be no public funeral. “A public event would allow for a show of the strength for the criminal family,” Reggio Calabria police said in a statement.
Authorities in Milan knew they needed to accelerate their investigation. At dawn on Sept. 30, they raided 40 homes and businesses, arresting 19 people, including Ferdico and Lucci. Beretta had already been arrested in the hours after Bellocco’s death. He was charged with murder, but claimed he had acted in self-defense. None of the defendants could be reached for comment.
The trial of 16 ultras began in early March. Soon after, Beretta was charged by prosecutors with organizing Boiocchi’s killing; five others were also arrested Friday in the case, including the alleged gunman. Beretta admitted to the crime, according to interrogation transcripts.
“We organized everything,” he told authorities, explaining that his plan was to get Boiocchi out of the way and install new leadership for the ultras.
By the time he made that admission, prosecutors said, Beretta had become a cooperating witness.
The reason for that cooperation was clear to everyone in Milan: If Beretta was sent to prison after killing an ’Ndrangheta leader, he wouldn’t last long.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/04/17/inter-ac-milan-ultra-fans-mafia/
They are the die-hard fans of Milan’s soccer teams — and mafia-linked
After two leaders of Inter Milan’s ultra group were killed, investigators concluded that the fan clubs of the Milan teams were run by the Italian mafia.
By Kevin Sieff
and
Francesco Porzio
MILAN — The two men climbed into a white hatchback. They had just finished working out at a gym on the outskirts of the city, making the most of a day without a game.
Antonio Bellocco, the short 36-year-old in the driver’s seat, and Andrea Beretta, the imposing 49-year-old in the passenger seat, were the leaders of the Curva Nord, a group of hardcore supporters of the legendary Inter Milan soccer club.
Fan groups in Italy known as “ultras” are at once a political identity, a business and the loudest section in a stadium. Their leaders have become important power brokers, capitalizing on the near-religiosity surrounding Italy’s most famous teams. Some ultras have forged connections to the political elite; others have become powerful drug traffickers.
As ultra leaders in Milan, Bellocco and Beretta had become influential figures in Italy’s richest city, thriving at the nexus of licit and illicit wealth, investigators say. Fans would ask Beretta to pose for photos before games as if he were a star forward. The diminutive Bellocco became widely known by his nickname, “Totò the Dwarf.”
What few people knew was that the two men were working for the Italian mafia, Italian investigators said, turning everything from ticket sales to beer concessions into a revenue stream for organized crime.
An undated photo of Antonio Bellocco. (State Police in Milan)
It was a cloudy afternoon early last September when the white car pulled away slowly from the gym. Suddenly, it lurched forward, video of the incident shows, as Bellocco apparently lost control, then opened his door and fell to the ground. He’d been stabbed 21 times by Beretta, his partner, who in turn had been shot in the leg by Bellocco, investigators said.
Bellocco died shortly afterward. He was the second leader of Inter Milan’s fan group to be killed in two years.
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Bellocco’s death and Beretta’s arrest would accelerate a police investigation that was already underway. The case would illustrate in remarkable detail how criminals had co-opted the fan club of one of the world’s most famous teams. The investigation would establish that the ultra leadership for Inter Milan’s storied rival and the city’s other major team, AC Milan, was also working for the mafia.
An undated photo of Andrea Beretta. (State Police in Milan)
As Italian soccer boomed into a multibillion-dollar business, it drew a new range of financial interests, from Persian Gulf states to American financiers. It turned out organized crime wasn’t far behind. Seeing a sport awash in cash, the mafia came looking for a piece of the action — scalping tickets, running concessions and stadium parking, and selling team merchandise. The ultras, with their long-established influence and connections at the clubs, as well as their reputation for violence, were the mafia’s conduit, investigators said.
Even though criminal groups have not infiltrated locker rooms or compromised results, investigators say, they have developed lines of communication with players, head coaches and other team officials — a startling collision of the two worlds.
Both Bellocco and Beretta were being wiretapped at the time of the killing. Transcripts of their phone calls are among thousands of pages of police and court documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents, along with hours of interviews, show the way organized crime has infiltrated some of the highest levels of Italian soccer fandom.
Inter Milan and AC Milan, both of which have American owners, declined to comment. Beretta’s attorney also declined to comment.
Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor. (Ivan Romano/Getty Images)
“It forces us to open our eyes to the reality — to the risks of mafia influence in the stadiums,” Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor, said after arrests were made in September: 19 members of the ultras charged with the crime of mafia association.
The trial, which began in March, has transfixed the country. “The onetime moral capital of Italy has discovered it has a boil as big as its skyscrapers,” said a headline in La Repubblica.
Prosecutors have forced both clubs to accept government-appointed advisers to stop the creep of organized crime into soccer. But Italian law enforcement officials worry that won’t be enough. The officials have threatened to name a public commissar to take over both clubs if they don’t extricate mafia elements from their fan base.
As if underscoring the challenge, the Inter Milan ultras agreed on a new slogan in the wake of the scandal:
“Since 1969. Proud, united, never tamed.”
Mafia infiltration
Ultras cheer after a goal in the Feb. 2 match between Inter Milan and AC Milan at the San Siro. Ultras sometimes light flares. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For more than a century, Inter Milan has been one of the world’s most popular sports teams. It won national and European championships. Its 75,000-seat stadium is almost always full; its global fan base is estimated at 55 million.
The team is famous, too, for the character of its most loyal supporters: Its ultra group is a fan base within a fan base. The Curva Nord (North Stand) is known for its ability to transform a home game, roaring in support for Inter, demoralizing opponents with thunderous hostility. Ultras have rained flares upon the field; they chant using megaphones; they can turn violent.
As European soccer boomed, the ultras also became a machine to generate profit and power. The mafia had insinuated itself into other top teams. In 2018, Italian investigators found that mobsters had infiltrated the ultra group of Turin-based Juventus, another of Europe’s most famous teams, seizing large amounts of ticketing revenue.
An undated photo of Vittorio Boiocchi. (State Police in Milan)
In Milan, the takeover began in 2019. That’s when the Inter ultras chose Vittorio Boiocchi, known as “the Uncle,” to be the group’s leader. Boiocchi was in his late 60s and had spent 26 years in prison for drug trafficking, kidnapping and theft.
After his release, drawing on connections to the ultras he had made as a young man, Boiocchi launched a network of scalpers who hawked wholesale tickets for a large markup. By 2020, he was making a million dollars a year from ticket sales and other stadium revenue, according to investigators. In his car he carried a pistol, handcuffs and bulletproof vests stolen from Italian law enforcement. He was accused of shaking down Milanese businessmen; other criminal groups had been talking on wiretapped lines about taking him out, investigators said.
On Oct. 29, 2022, two men on a motorcycle drove past Boiocchi’s home in northern Milan as he was arriving. One of the men fired five shots from a 9mm gun. Boiocchi died minutes after arriving at a hospital.
Police investigate near the site of Boiocchi's killing in Milan on Oct. 29, 2022. (Claudio Furlan/LaPresse/AP)
The killing left the ultras leaderless — an inflection point in the history of the group. Some fans said Boiocchi’s demise was an opportunity to cut ties with the mafia. But several of the group’s top lieutenants, including Andrea Beretta and another man named Marco Ferdico, argued that it was time to double down, investigators said.
Ferdico had an idea of how to do it. His wife was from Italy’s southern Calabria region. Through her, he knew members of the Bellocco family, key members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s largest organized crime group. There was one Bellocco who seemed a good fit because of his standing within the mafia: Antonio was the son of Giulio and Aurora Bellocco, who were both in prison for mafia association. His uncle Umberto had been a longtime ’Ndrangheta boss.
The police were listening to wiretaps as the ultras appeared to settle on Bellocco.
“When we heard the name ‘Bellocco,’ we knew — ‘Okay, this is going to get serious,’” said one police officer who worked on the investigation. The officer, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The fans of one of Italy’s most successful teams were about to import one of its most infamous crime families.
Targeting Milan’s iconic soccer stadium
Fans depart the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. The final score was 1-1. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The ’Ndrangheta was founded in the 1860s in Calabria, where it began blackmailing farmers and stealing cattle. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the group went global. It is now “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” according to Interpol. It operates enterprises from Colombian drug-trafficking rings to Canadian banks. Its members have been arrested in Brooklyn and Guyana and Ivory Coast.
Corrupting the fan base of an Italian soccer club would be a major coup for the ’Ndrangheta and the Belloccos, one of the organization’s most prominent subgroups or “clans,” according to anti-mafia prosecutors. When the ’Ndrangheta took over the Juventus ultras in 2017, they applied the same extortion tactics used in other sectors. At one point, they threatened to have the ultras sing racist chants during games, which could result in a fine for the team, if management didn’t hand over more tickets, investigators said.
Police would later arrest 12 ultra leaders on charges of blackmail. The president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli, was suspended for “unauthorized relations with ultra fans.”
Juventus President Andrea Agnelli at an April 2021 match with Parma in the Juventus stadium in Turin. (Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
But it was Italy’s financial capital, home to two of its most prestigious soccer teams, where the ’Ndrangheta’s most significant incursion into soccer would occur.
Milan had long been an ’Ndrangheta power base, one of the first places the group had expanded beyond its southern Italian roots. With Boiocchi dead, the group had an opportunity to consolidate its influence at the city’s iconic soccer stadium — the San Siro, where both Inter and AC Milan play.
Antonio Bellocco arrived in Milan in 2022. At around that time, in the wake of Boiocchi’s killing, the police had wiretapped many of the team’s ultra members.
What they heard was Bellocco bulldozing his way into the Inter community, using his ties to the ’Ndrangheta to establish his standing. He was unconcerned about Inter’s performance; he wanted to use the club to accrue money and power.
“I don’t give a damn about the team,” he said on one wiretapped call. “I don’t do things for the banners. I do it for economic interests.”
After Bellocco’s arrival, he, Beretta and Ferdico expanded the business that Boiocchi had launched. Every aspect of fan culture would be monetized, they decided, according to the wiretaps, with a portion of the earnings returning to the ’Ndrangheta through Bellocco.
Fans shop at a stand outside the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The men sourced tickets for away games directly from the team management at wholesale prices and sold them for many multiples of their face value. In the 2023 Champions League final against Manchester City in Istanbul — the biggest game in European soccer — Beretta estimated that they made $270,000 in profits by selling tickets for roughly $1,000 each to desperate fans.
To get those tickets, Ferdico called Inter coach Simone Inzaghi and made an unsubtle threat, alluding to the ability of the ultras to cause problems for the club.
“I’ll be brief, sir,” Ferdico said on a wiretapped call. “We have 1,000 tickets, but we need 200 more to be calm.”
Inzaghi said on the call that he worried Ferdico would instruct fans not to cheer unless he got what he wanted. Inzaghi sent the request to the club’s administration.
An undated photo of Marco Ferdico. (State Police in Milan)
Ferdico got the additional tickets, investigators said.
Inzaghi, through a team spokesman, declined to comment. Ferdico could not be reached for comment.
The question of the team’s relationship to the ’Ndrangheta would become a focus of the police investigation: To what degree were coaches and players complicit?
Prosecutors would later interrogate several officials from both Inter and AC Milan and determine that the teams were “damaged parties” in the case, not suspects. But other Italian officials publicly questioned why the club hierarchies had not alerted authorities to mafia influence.
“Soccer is a business activity, and criminal organizations are interested in all business activities. Unfortunately, we have seen that there are no complaints from the entrepreneurs who are the victims,” Antonio Quintavalle, a general in the finance police, said at a news conference.
Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi watches his team during the Feb. 2 match at the San Siro. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Bellocco and Beretta had found a way to monetize almost everything that happened at the San Siro, which is owned by the municipality of Milan. Some of the ’Ndrangheta revenue streams were small: The men took over the sale of team magazines, which brought in several thousand dollars a game.
“It’s textbook mafia behavior,” said Antonio Nicaso, who has written dozens of books on the ’Ndrangheta. “The idea was: ‘We are a pseudo authority and everything is under our control. We are running territory — in this case the stadium — and receiving a portion of any profits.’”
They controlled licenses for beer vendors at the stadium, which they sold weekly. They controlled the sale of merchandise and food outside the stadium and parking under and near the stadium. Police said they believe the revenue from the San Siro was reinvested in illicit activities around the world.
In some cases, the men were less interested in generating immediate profits than building relationships that could be monetized in the future. For example, Beretta later told prosecutors that one of the reasons they were eager to control the VIP parking lot under the stadium was that “you see football players, you see managers. It’s about relationships.”
A secret alliance
An emptied San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Ahead of the Champions League final in 2023, Ferdico and Bellocco walked into Italian Ink, a tattoo parlor and barbershop in Milan.
They had arrived to see the shop’s owner, Luca Lucci, a bald, tattooed weightlifter nicknamed “the Joker.” Lucci had his hand in businesses across Milan. But most famously, he was the head of the ultras of AC Milan, Inter Milan’s rival.
Fans of the two teams had clashed for decades. Their faceoffs are considered to be among the most heated matches in modern sport. So it was odd that Bellocco and Ferdico would walk into Italian Ink. By then, undercover police were trailing them.
Lucci had his own ties to organized crime. In 2019, according to a pending charge, he trafficked two tons of cocaine using an ’Ndrangheta route from South America to Italy. Now, investigators discovered, he and Bellocco were working together to monetize the warring ultra groups.
An undated photo of Luca Lucci. (State Police in Milan)
“The investigations show that the leaders of the two fan groups had a nonbelligerent relationship to maximize illicit profits,” the chief prosecutor of Milan, Marcello Viola, said in describing the accord to reporters.
Lucci’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
It would later emerge that during the visit to Italian Ink, Bellocco and Lucci were negotiating a 50-50 split of ticket proceeds from the Champions League final in Istanbul regardless of whether Inter or AC Milan, slated to meet in the semifinal, qualified for the championship.
The police, dumbstruck, heard Ferdico explain the merits of the deal to Beretta over the phone: “If we make it to the final, we split it in two. If they make it, we split it in two — either way, you’ve still won.”
Rising tension
Police outside the San Siro before the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Milan police operated out of the third floor of the local police department, in a stately 19th-century building just north of the city center.
By 2024, the officers had been watching Bellocco and Beretta for nearly two years. A Milan public prosecutor, Paolo Storari, was planning a major crackdown on mafia influence in soccer. The case was deemed so sensitive that the prefecture of Milan ordered permanent police protection for Storari, who understood the high stakes of tangling with Milan’s teams.
Both teams had connections to Italian politics (Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time prime minister of Italy, had owned AC Milan). They had wealthy international backers. RedBird Capital, an American private equity company, purchased a controlling stake in AC Milan in 2022 in a deal worth more than $1.2 billion. American asset management company Oaktree Capital Management owns Inter Milan.
On their wiretaps throughout 2024, police officers said, they sensed tension between Bellocco and Beretta. Beretta ran a store selling Inter merchandise called We Are Milano — another element of the business that Bellocco seemed interested in taking over.
“At one point, we could tell that Beretta feared for his life,” one officer said in an interview.
Beretta would later tell police in an interrogation that he believed his former friend would poison his coffee and bury him outside Milan.
When the police got the call that someone had been stabbed in Bellocco’s car outside the gym, most officers assumed Beretta was dead.
“It was a shock to learn that actually it was the other way around,” said the officer.
Bellocco’s body was transported to Calabria. But police in the region’s largest city made an announcement: There would be no public funeral. “A public event would allow for a show of the strength for the criminal family,” Reggio Calabria police said in a statement.
Authorities in Milan knew they needed to accelerate their investigation. At dawn on Sept. 30, they raided 40 homes and businesses, arresting 19 people, including Ferdico and Lucci. Beretta had already been arrested in the hours after Bellocco’s death. He was charged with murder, but claimed he had acted in self-defense. None of the defendants could be reached for comment.
The trial of 16 ultras began in early March. Soon after, Beretta was charged by prosecutors with organizing Boiocchi’s killing; five others were also arrested Friday in the case, including the alleged gunman. Beretta admitted to the crime, according to interrogation transcripts.
“We organized everything,” he told authorities, explaining that his plan was to get Boiocchi out of the way and install new leadership for the ultras.
By the time he made that admission, prosecutors said, Beretta had become a cooperating witness.
The reason for that cooperation was clear to everyone in Milan: If Beretta was sent to prison after killing an ’Ndrangheta leader, he wouldn’t last long.
After two leaders of Inter Milan’s ultra group were killed, investigators concluded that the fan clubs of the Milan teams were run by the Italian mafia.
By Kevin Sieff
and
Francesco Porzio
MILAN — The two men climbed into a white hatchback. They had just finished working out at a gym on the outskirts of the city, making the most of a day without a game.
Antonio Bellocco, the short 36-year-old in the driver’s seat, and Andrea Beretta, the imposing 49-year-old in the passenger seat, were the leaders of the Curva Nord, a group of hardcore supporters of the legendary Inter Milan soccer club.
Fan groups in Italy known as “ultras” are at once a political identity, a business and the loudest section in a stadium. Their leaders have become important power brokers, capitalizing on the near-religiosity surrounding Italy’s most famous teams. Some ultras have forged connections to the political elite; others have become powerful drug traffickers.
As ultra leaders in Milan, Bellocco and Beretta had become influential figures in Italy’s richest city, thriving at the nexus of licit and illicit wealth, investigators say. Fans would ask Beretta to pose for photos before games as if he were a star forward. The diminutive Bellocco became widely known by his nickname, “Totò the Dwarf.”
What few people knew was that the two men were working for the Italian mafia, Italian investigators said, turning everything from ticket sales to beer concessions into a revenue stream for organized crime.
It was a cloudy afternoon early last September when the white car pulled away slowly from the gym. Suddenly, it lurched forward, video of the incident shows, as Bellocco apparently lost control, then opened his door and fell to the ground. He’d been stabbed 21 times by Beretta, his partner, who in turn had been shot in the leg by Bellocco, investigators said.
Bellocco died shortly afterward. He was the second leader of Inter Milan’s fan group to be killed in two years.
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Bellocco’s death and Beretta’s arrest would accelerate a police investigation that was already underway. The case would illustrate in remarkable detail how criminals had co-opted the fan club of one of the world’s most famous teams. The investigation would establish that the ultra leadership for Inter Milan’s storied rival and the city’s other major team, AC Milan, was also working for the mafia.
As Italian soccer boomed into a multibillion-dollar business, it drew a new range of financial interests, from Persian Gulf states to American financiers. It turned out organized crime wasn’t far behind. Seeing a sport awash in cash, the mafia came looking for a piece of the action — scalping tickets, running concessions and stadium parking, and selling team merchandise. The ultras, with their long-established influence and connections at the clubs, as well as their reputation for violence, were the mafia’s conduit, investigators said.
Even though criminal groups have not infiltrated locker rooms or compromised results, investigators say, they have developed lines of communication with players, head coaches and other team officials — a startling collision of the two worlds.
Both Bellocco and Beretta were being wiretapped at the time of the killing. Transcripts of their phone calls are among thousands of pages of police and court documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents, along with hours of interviews, show the way organized crime has infiltrated some of the highest levels of Italian soccer fandom.
Inter Milan and AC Milan, both of which have American owners, declined to comment. Beretta’s attorney also declined to comment.
Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor. (Ivan Romano/Getty Images)
“It forces us to open our eyes to the reality — to the risks of mafia influence in the stadiums,” Giovanni Melillo, Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutor, said after arrests were made in September: 19 members of the ultras charged with the crime of mafia association.
The trial, which began in March, has transfixed the country. “The onetime moral capital of Italy has discovered it has a boil as big as its skyscrapers,” said a headline in La Repubblica.
Prosecutors have forced both clubs to accept government-appointed advisers to stop the creep of organized crime into soccer. But Italian law enforcement officials worry that won’t be enough. The officials have threatened to name a public commissar to take over both clubs if they don’t extricate mafia elements from their fan base.
As if underscoring the challenge, the Inter Milan ultras agreed on a new slogan in the wake of the scandal:
“Since 1969. Proud, united, never tamed.”
Mafia infiltration
Ultras cheer after a goal in the Feb. 2 match between Inter Milan and AC Milan at the San Siro. Ultras sometimes light flares. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
For more than a century, Inter Milan has been one of the world’s most popular sports teams. It won national and European championships. Its 75,000-seat stadium is almost always full; its global fan base is estimated at 55 million.
The team is famous, too, for the character of its most loyal supporters: Its ultra group is a fan base within a fan base. The Curva Nord (North Stand) is known for its ability to transform a home game, roaring in support for Inter, demoralizing opponents with thunderous hostility. Ultras have rained flares upon the field; they chant using megaphones; they can turn violent.
As European soccer boomed, the ultras also became a machine to generate profit and power. The mafia had insinuated itself into other top teams. In 2018, Italian investigators found that mobsters had infiltrated the ultra group of Turin-based Juventus, another of Europe’s most famous teams, seizing large amounts of ticketing revenue.
In Milan, the takeover began in 2019. That’s when the Inter ultras chose Vittorio Boiocchi, known as “the Uncle,” to be the group’s leader. Boiocchi was in his late 60s and had spent 26 years in prison for drug trafficking, kidnapping and theft.
After his release, drawing on connections to the ultras he had made as a young man, Boiocchi launched a network of scalpers who hawked wholesale tickets for a large markup. By 2020, he was making a million dollars a year from ticket sales and other stadium revenue, according to investigators. In his car he carried a pistol, handcuffs and bulletproof vests stolen from Italian law enforcement. He was accused of shaking down Milanese businessmen; other criminal groups had been talking on wiretapped lines about taking him out, investigators said.
On Oct. 29, 2022, two men on a motorcycle drove past Boiocchi’s home in northern Milan as he was arriving. One of the men fired five shots from a 9mm gun. Boiocchi died minutes after arriving at a hospital.
Police investigate near the site of Boiocchi's killing in Milan on Oct. 29, 2022. (Claudio Furlan/LaPresse/AP)
The killing left the ultras leaderless — an inflection point in the history of the group. Some fans said Boiocchi’s demise was an opportunity to cut ties with the mafia. But several of the group’s top lieutenants, including Andrea Beretta and another man named Marco Ferdico, argued that it was time to double down, investigators said.
Ferdico had an idea of how to do it. His wife was from Italy’s southern Calabria region. Through her, he knew members of the Bellocco family, key members of the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s largest organized crime group. There was one Bellocco who seemed a good fit because of his standing within the mafia: Antonio was the son of Giulio and Aurora Bellocco, who were both in prison for mafia association. His uncle Umberto had been a longtime ’Ndrangheta boss.
The police were listening to wiretaps as the ultras appeared to settle on Bellocco.
“When we heard the name ‘Bellocco,’ we knew — ‘Okay, this is going to get serious,’” said one police officer who worked on the investigation. The officer, like some others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The fans of one of Italy’s most successful teams were about to import one of its most infamous crime families.
Targeting Milan’s iconic soccer stadium
Fans depart the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. The final score was 1-1. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The ’Ndrangheta was founded in the 1860s in Calabria, where it began blackmailing farmers and stealing cattle. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the group went global. It is now “one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world,” according to Interpol. It operates enterprises from Colombian drug-trafficking rings to Canadian banks. Its members have been arrested in Brooklyn and Guyana and Ivory Coast.
Corrupting the fan base of an Italian soccer club would be a major coup for the ’Ndrangheta and the Belloccos, one of the organization’s most prominent subgroups or “clans,” according to anti-mafia prosecutors. When the ’Ndrangheta took over the Juventus ultras in 2017, they applied the same extortion tactics used in other sectors. At one point, they threatened to have the ultras sing racist chants during games, which could result in a fine for the team, if management didn’t hand over more tickets, investigators said.
Police would later arrest 12 ultra leaders on charges of blackmail. The president of Juventus, Andrea Agnelli, was suspended for “unauthorized relations with ultra fans.”
Juventus President Andrea Agnelli at an April 2021 match with Parma in the Juventus stadium in Turin. (Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images)
But it was Italy’s financial capital, home to two of its most prestigious soccer teams, where the ’Ndrangheta’s most significant incursion into soccer would occur.
Milan had long been an ’Ndrangheta power base, one of the first places the group had expanded beyond its southern Italian roots. With Boiocchi dead, the group had an opportunity to consolidate its influence at the city’s iconic soccer stadium — the San Siro, where both Inter and AC Milan play.
Antonio Bellocco arrived in Milan in 2022. At around that time, in the wake of Boiocchi’s killing, the police had wiretapped many of the team’s ultra members.
What they heard was Bellocco bulldozing his way into the Inter community, using his ties to the ’Ndrangheta to establish his standing. He was unconcerned about Inter’s performance; he wanted to use the club to accrue money and power.
“I don’t give a damn about the team,” he said on one wiretapped call. “I don’t do things for the banners. I do it for economic interests.”
After Bellocco’s arrival, he, Beretta and Ferdico expanded the business that Boiocchi had launched. Every aspect of fan culture would be monetized, they decided, according to the wiretaps, with a portion of the earnings returning to the ’Ndrangheta through Bellocco.
Fans shop at a stand outside the San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The men sourced tickets for away games directly from the team management at wholesale prices and sold them for many multiples of their face value. In the 2023 Champions League final against Manchester City in Istanbul — the biggest game in European soccer — Beretta estimated that they made $270,000 in profits by selling tickets for roughly $1,000 each to desperate fans.
To get those tickets, Ferdico called Inter coach Simone Inzaghi and made an unsubtle threat, alluding to the ability of the ultras to cause problems for the club.
“I’ll be brief, sir,” Ferdico said on a wiretapped call. “We have 1,000 tickets, but we need 200 more to be calm.”
Inzaghi said on the call that he worried Ferdico would instruct fans not to cheer unless he got what he wanted. Inzaghi sent the request to the club’s administration.
Ferdico got the additional tickets, investigators said.
Inzaghi, through a team spokesman, declined to comment. Ferdico could not be reached for comment.
The question of the team’s relationship to the ’Ndrangheta would become a focus of the police investigation: To what degree were coaches and players complicit?
Prosecutors would later interrogate several officials from both Inter and AC Milan and determine that the teams were “damaged parties” in the case, not suspects. But other Italian officials publicly questioned why the club hierarchies had not alerted authorities to mafia influence.
“Soccer is a business activity, and criminal organizations are interested in all business activities. Unfortunately, we have seen that there are no complaints from the entrepreneurs who are the victims,” Antonio Quintavalle, a general in the finance police, said at a news conference.
Inter Milan head coach Simone Inzaghi watches his team during the Feb. 2 match at the San Siro. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Bellocco and Beretta had found a way to monetize almost everything that happened at the San Siro, which is owned by the municipality of Milan. Some of the ’Ndrangheta revenue streams were small: The men took over the sale of team magazines, which brought in several thousand dollars a game.
“It’s textbook mafia behavior,” said Antonio Nicaso, who has written dozens of books on the ’Ndrangheta. “The idea was: ‘We are a pseudo authority and everything is under our control. We are running territory — in this case the stadium — and receiving a portion of any profits.’”
They controlled licenses for beer vendors at the stadium, which they sold weekly. They controlled the sale of merchandise and food outside the stadium and parking under and near the stadium. Police said they believe the revenue from the San Siro was reinvested in illicit activities around the world.
In some cases, the men were less interested in generating immediate profits than building relationships that could be monetized in the future. For example, Beretta later told prosecutors that one of the reasons they were eager to control the VIP parking lot under the stadium was that “you see football players, you see managers. It’s about relationships.”
A secret alliance
An emptied San Siro after the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
Ahead of the Champions League final in 2023, Ferdico and Bellocco walked into Italian Ink, a tattoo parlor and barbershop in Milan.
They had arrived to see the shop’s owner, Luca Lucci, a bald, tattooed weightlifter nicknamed “the Joker.” Lucci had his hand in businesses across Milan. But most famously, he was the head of the ultras of AC Milan, Inter Milan’s rival.
Fans of the two teams had clashed for decades. Their faceoffs are considered to be among the most heated matches in modern sport. So it was odd that Bellocco and Ferdico would walk into Italian Ink. By then, undercover police were trailing them.
Lucci had his own ties to organized crime. In 2019, according to a pending charge, he trafficked two tons of cocaine using an ’Ndrangheta route from South America to Italy. Now, investigators discovered, he and Bellocco were working together to monetize the warring ultra groups.
“The investigations show that the leaders of the two fan groups had a nonbelligerent relationship to maximize illicit profits,” the chief prosecutor of Milan, Marcello Viola, said in describing the accord to reporters.
Lucci’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
It would later emerge that during the visit to Italian Ink, Bellocco and Lucci were negotiating a 50-50 split of ticket proceeds from the Champions League final in Istanbul regardless of whether Inter or AC Milan, slated to meet in the semifinal, qualified for the championship.
The police, dumbstruck, heard Ferdico explain the merits of the deal to Beretta over the phone: “If we make it to the final, we split it in two. If they make it, we split it in two — either way, you’ve still won.”
Rising tension
Police outside the San Siro before the Feb. 2 match. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)
The Milan police operated out of the third floor of the local police department, in a stately 19th-century building just north of the city center.
By 2024, the officers had been watching Bellocco and Beretta for nearly two years. A Milan public prosecutor, Paolo Storari, was planning a major crackdown on mafia influence in soccer. The case was deemed so sensitive that the prefecture of Milan ordered permanent police protection for Storari, who understood the high stakes of tangling with Milan’s teams.
Both teams had connections to Italian politics (Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time prime minister of Italy, had owned AC Milan). They had wealthy international backers. RedBird Capital, an American private equity company, purchased a controlling stake in AC Milan in 2022 in a deal worth more than $1.2 billion. American asset management company Oaktree Capital Management owns Inter Milan.
On their wiretaps throughout 2024, police officers said, they sensed tension between Bellocco and Beretta. Beretta ran a store selling Inter merchandise called We Are Milano — another element of the business that Bellocco seemed interested in taking over.
“At one point, we could tell that Beretta feared for his life,” one officer said in an interview.
Beretta would later tell police in an interrogation that he believed his former friend would poison his coffee and bury him outside Milan.
When the police got the call that someone had been stabbed in Bellocco’s car outside the gym, most officers assumed Beretta was dead.
“It was a shock to learn that actually it was the other way around,” said the officer.
Bellocco’s body was transported to Calabria. But police in the region’s largest city made an announcement: There would be no public funeral. “A public event would allow for a show of the strength for the criminal family,” Reggio Calabria police said in a statement.
Authorities in Milan knew they needed to accelerate their investigation. At dawn on Sept. 30, they raided 40 homes and businesses, arresting 19 people, including Ferdico and Lucci. Beretta had already been arrested in the hours after Bellocco’s death. He was charged with murder, but claimed he had acted in self-defense. None of the defendants could be reached for comment.
The trial of 16 ultras began in early March. Soon after, Beretta was charged by prosecutors with organizing Boiocchi’s killing; five others were also arrested Friday in the case, including the alleged gunman. Beretta admitted to the crime, according to interrogation transcripts.
“We organized everything,” he told authorities, explaining that his plan was to get Boiocchi out of the way and install new leadership for the ultras.
By the time he made that admission, prosecutors said, Beretta had become a cooperating witness.
The reason for that cooperation was clear to everyone in Milan: If Beretta was sent to prison after killing an ’Ndrangheta leader, he wouldn’t last long.
